User Group: Wissenschaftler:innen

  • Cyber Valley Days: Innovation through collaboration

    Cyber Valley Days: Innovation through collaboration

    In the following interview, Alina Benze, Business Development Manager at Cyber Valley GmbH, shares her experiences of the three-day event.

    What was your key takeaway from Cyber Valley Days?

    One of the standout moments for me was Thomas Reith’s (Site Lead Biberach, Boehringer Ingelheim) speech at the Finale of Cyber Valley Days. He highlighted that Boehringer Ingelheim is already generating 50% of its innovation through external collaboration. This proved the success of a key message I’m always sharing with new or existing members of the Cyber Valley Community. The topic of AI and robotics is so dynamic and development cycles are so short that it is important to partner up with other players to stay ahead in the game.

    Was there a particular moment during Cyber Valley Days that you found especially inspiring?

    Hearing Yann LeCun’s (VP and Chief AI Scientist, Meta) talk was overall a very impressive moment and for sure something extraordinary. Apart from the interesting perspective he shared on the current status of intelligent systems and its limitations, I found the following call-to-action very inspiring: He asked us not to be scared but to appreciate both the people and machines working for us that are also in fact smarter than us. I think this is a very unique attitude from a lead scientist at a global technology company. This should inspire the many others who are leading big and small teams in all forms of organizations – from research institutes, start-ups, SMEs to global corporates.

    Read further interviews with Rebecca Beiter (Director of Communication & Society), Janell Lia-Breitmeyer (Scientific Coordinator), and Paul-David Bittner (Business Development Manager, Start-ups) to discover their perspectives on Cyber Valley Days. 

  • Cyber Valley Days: Building a better future

    Cyber Valley Days: Building a better future

    In the following interview, Noora Zech, Chief of Staff for Cyber Valley GmbH, shares her perspective on this three-day event.

    What was your biggest surprise during Cyber Valley Days? 

    It was not the number of visitors but the quality, as well as the international, diverse, and clearly thriving community, which I found impressive and inspiring.

    What did you learn about the Cyber Valley Community?

    I was amazed at how big our community is. It is one thing to talk about what we are and what we do on an abstract level but seeing it in real life made me realize how much we have achieved and how we’ve grown. Our community spans the excellent research from the Max-Planck Institutes, and the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen; post-docs and students establishing start-ups; partners from industry enabling transfer; worldwide collaborations with institutions and companies such as Silo AI, Seoul AI Hub, AIIS, and the University of Tokyo who are expanding and maximizing our potential. All these ultimately benefit society. 

    I love it when people come together to create something for the better! 

    What was your personal highlight from Cyber Valley Days and what were your key takeaways?

    I had the chance to listen to Sepp Hochreiter’s interview, which was both exciting and funny. To see the person who invented LSTM (long short-term memory) felt a bit surreal. 

    Even though there were many high-ranking scientists present, it was reassuring how smart yet normal they were, and I felt I could relate to them.

    On the other hand, they also pointed out what we still lack and what we need to work on in the future to achieve our vision of using AI for the greater good of the world. As an example, we need more pragmatic and realistic regulations to enable innovative research and spin-offs. We should encourage scientists to stay in research and support them with the resources they need.  We must rethink and recreate the current system if we want innovation and solutions.

    Read further interviews with Angelina Jukic (Program Manager), Alina Benze (Business Development Manager, Corporates), Rebecca Beiter (Director of Communication & Society), Janell Lia-Breitmeyer (Scientific Coordinator), and Paul-David Bittner (Business Development Manager, Start-ups) to discover their perspectives on Cyber Valley Days. 

     
  • Maschinelles Lernen in der Wissenschaft

    Maschinelles Lernen in der Wissenschaft

     

    AI has been a hot topic, especially since the release of Chat GPT-3 in November 2022. But what role do AI and machine learning play in the natural sciences? Could they transform scientific research or are the current expectations set too high? Join the discussion as these questions are explored.

     

    What?

    A podium discussion will take place, moderated by TT-Prof. Pascal Friederich (Institute of Theoretical Informatics)

    Participants
    TT-Prof. Peer Nowack (Institute of Theoretical Informatics)
    TT-Prof. Benjamin Schäfer (Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics)
    Dr. Charlotte Debus (Scientific Computing Center)
     

    When?

    Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024

    Time: 19:00–21:00

     

    Where?

    Triangel Karlsruhe 
    Kaiserstraße 93, 76133 Karlsruhe


    Find out more information about this event here.

  • Cyber Valley Days: Bringing together AI visionaries

    Cyber Valley Days: Bringing together AI visionaries

    In the following interview, Paul-David Bittner, Business Development Manager at Cyber Valley GmbH, shares his perspective on the three-day event. 

    What was your personal highlight from Cyber Valley Days? 

    The Demo Day for The AI Incubator was my personal highlight. It was amazing to see eight teams pitch their start-up ideas to such a large audience and a top-notch panel of judges. I was really proud to see their progress and how everyone outdid themselves on the day.

    Which session did you find most inspiring?

    The Investor & Deep Tech Day really brought the crème de la crème of the investment world to Cyber Valley. It was inspiring to hear their panel discussions and opinions on the AI start-up scene in Germany and Europe. Their presence and interest clearly demonstrated the high potential of these promising young deep-tech start-ups coming out of our community.

     
    How did Cyber Valley Days help reinforce a sense of community?

    It was great to see brilliant people from all kinds of backgrounds – start-ups, researchers, corporations, and politicians – mixing and mingling, and sharing ideas and visions. I am sure many of them made new connections that will lead to fruitful collaborations and more in the future.

    Cyber Valley's Start-up Network builds and fosters a community of entrepreneurs. Learn more about the network and apply to join here.

    The next round of The AI Incubator will start on November 7. Learn more about The AI Incubator here. 

    Read our interviews with Rebecca Beiter (Director of Communication & Society) and Janell Lia-Breitmeyer (Scientific Coordinator) to discover their perspectives on Cyber Valley Days. 

  • Science Hub Research Symposium 2024

    Science Hub Research Symposium 2024

     

    This two-day event will bring research communities together to highlight the latest innovations and breakthroughs. Attendees can look forward to keynote speeches, lightning talks, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities.

     

    What?

    The event will cover a range of topics, including:

    • Haptic intelligence and the simulation of clothing pressure fields
    • Physically plausible object pose refinement in cluttered scenes and insights into what foundation models know about 3D humans
    • Advances in machine learning, such as root cause analysis at Amazon, thermodynamics-guided techniques to improve aluminum recycling, and making time series classification more understandable using multiple instance learning
    • Cutting-edge research in document-level relation extraction and entity linking, deep selective state-space models, and improving decision-making with machine learning

    Further program information can be found here.

     

    When and where?

    On September 16th, the event will take place at MPI-IS Tübingen.

    On September 17th, the event will take place at Amazon Entwicklungszentrum in Tübingen.

     

    Registration

    Please RSVP through the event website.

  • Cyber Valley Days: Inspiring the AI of the future

    Cyber Valley Days: Inspiring the AI of the future

    How did Cyber Valley Days help reinforce a sense of community within Cyber Valley?

    During the Corona pandemic, it was not possible to meet in person. Even though we made quite a few online formats for the community to meet each other, real dialogue, networking, and exchange are just easier in person. With our Meet-ups and other regular events, we built a sense of community. Cyber Valley Days made it possible for our community to meet and network to an unprecedented extent. It was really great to see how much we have grown over the years and how diverse, varied, and international our community has become.

    What was the most memorable interaction you had during Cyber Valley Days?

    For me, the conversations with Yann LeCun were particularly memorable, along with many great memories. His view of AI is very hopeful and his assessments of the future of AI are based on a broad range of specialist knowledge. Despite his expert knowledge, he manages to explain AI and current developments in a way that is easily accessible and understandable for everyone – this was particularly impressive for me as a communicator. 

    Which session did you find most impactful or inspiring and why?

    Cyber Valley Days had an incredibly dense and top-class program of speakers. Nevertheless, the finale of The AI Incubator remains the highlight for me, because this is where I see young people with new ideas on how technology can make the world a better place. They are all driven by an inner motivation to use AI sensibly, sustainably, and for the benefit of all. Their ideas inspire me each time!

    Read further interviews with the Cyber Valley Team here!

     
  • Cyber Valley Research Fund bringt robotische Wahrnehmungstechniken voran

    Cyber Valley Research Fund bringt robotische Wahrnehmungstechniken voran

    Current autonomous systems still lack the capabilities of humans in scene perception and object manipulation tasks. Jörg Stückler and his team developed a method that combines differentiable physics and deep learning to estimate an object’s position, orientation, and velocity, while also simultaneously determining the friction between an object and its surface. The team also explored how understanding an object’s dynamics could improve control strategies, such as predicting how a robot’s actions will impact the object and guiding it to a desired location.  

    Their findings inspire new methods and approaches that adapt robotics object manipulation skills to the physical properties of objects. Although the research is still in its scientific development stage, it has the potential to revolutionize applications by enabling robots to manipulate objects more flexibly and adaptively.  

    This project yielded the following publications: 


    1. Kandukuri, R. K., Strecke, M., Stueckler, J. Physics-Based Rigid Body Object Tracking and Friction Filtering From RGB-D Videos. Accepted for International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2024. Preprint arXiv:2309.15703. 

    2. EV-SynPhys and EV-RealPhys datasets accompanying at https://keeper.mpdl.mpg.de/d/5ec213b655b44e40a382/ 

    3. The 3DV 2024 paper was presented as poster presentation at the International Conference on 3D Vision 2024. Parts of the results reported in the paper have been also presented in a keynote given at the IEEE International Conference on Multi-Sensor Fusion and Integration / Symposium on Sensor and Data Fusion (MFI/SDF) in Bonn in November 2023. Parts of the project results have been presented at the Cyber Valley Research Fund symposium in November 2023. 

    This research project started in June 2020 and concluded in December 2023. Dr. Jörg Stückler is now a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Augsburg.