Cyber Valley Health Initiative

The University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institutes for Biological Cybernetics and Intelligent Systems have launched a new initiative for the use of artificial intelligence in medicine and the life sciences.

Initial steps:

The University of Tübingen and its medical faculty will, in a first step, establish four additional professorships in this promising field of research. They will focus on the evaluation of medical image data, sequencing, and meta data, as well as on time series or statistics using machine learning methods, among other things, thus creating new AI-supported instruments for diagnosis, therapy decisions, and the development of new drugs.

Partners and supporters:

University of Tübingen
Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics
Max Planck Institute of Intelligent Systems
University of Stuttgart
German Cancer Research Center
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
University of Heidelberg, and all medical universities in Baden-Württemberg
Hertie Foundation

Quotes:

The current pandemic shows that we need to become faster and more efficient in fighting global health threats. In the future, we must thus make much greater use of the potential of AI. The new initiative offers the opportunity to combine all our strengths and give Baden-Württemberg global visibility when it comes to AI applications in medicine.

Theresia Bauer, Baden-Württemberg’s Science Minister

With the construction of the Cyber Valley building in the Tübingen Technology Park, which is currently in the planning stage, the Max Planck Society and the university have made provisions for the possible accommodation of the new professorships and their research groups in the second construction phase. In particular, we aim to cooperate closely with the University of Stuttgart, which is a world-class institution in areas such as data integration and simulation technology.

Bernd Engler, President of the University of Tübingen

With our AI Health Initiative, we will continue to build on an already strong foundation. From patient care to diagnostics and individualized treatment, the possibilities for enhancing modern medicine with AI and robotics are endless. By pooling our strengths, we aim to make a decisive contribution to driving research in the field of AI and health forward.

Michael Black, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Cyber Valley Spokesperson

Our basic research helps offer a firm foundation for the pioneering translational plans of this excellent initiative. For instance, work on the advanced analysis of high-resolution magnetic resonance images of the human brain offers new insights that could illuminate normal and dysfunctional neural organization. Cognitive tasks designed in consilience with artificial intelligence principles to index hidden dimensions of human decision-making are being purposed to examine the nature and course of psychiatric disease.

Peter Dayan, Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

In the Cyber Valley Health Initiative, the University of Stuttgart’s focus on robotics perfectly complements the University of Tübingen’s specialization in machine learning. By working together, we can explore new questions in the field of health and find the answers together. In particular, the SimTech Cluster of Excellence plays a central role here – among other things, it supports us in developing intelligent systems for a sustainable society in the sphere of medical research.

Wolfram Ressel, Rector of the University of Stuttgart

The use of modern medical diagnostic procedures generates enormous amounts of data, the evaluation of which can hardly be handled by conventional methods. Similar challenges arise in the life sciences for a wide range of issues, from basic research to the translation of research results into clinical application, for example in personalized medicine. I am thus convinced that in the coming years and decades, groundbreaking successes in medical research and patient care will be accompanied by the use of artificial intelligence.

Bernd Pichler, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tübingen