10 November 2020 | Stuttgart/Tübingen

Cyber Valley institutions once again among Germany’s top ranked at leading machine learning conference

In total, 31 papers from Cyber Valley have been accepted to the upcoming NeurIPS 2020 conference

With 31 accepted papers, researchers from the Cyber Valley ecosystem are set to make a strong showing once again at the upcoming 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). In light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s leading conference for machine learning is going to be held online from December 6 to 12.

Submissions to NeurIPS have tripled since 2017, with another sharp increase this year: a staggering 9467 full papers were submitted to the 2020 conference, a 40 percent year-on-year increase. Of these, 1903 papers were accepted.

“Our strong year-on-year showing at one of the world’s most competitive machine learning conferences clearly supports our argument that we are attracting and educating the world’s best minds,” said Professor Bernhard Schölkopf, Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and Director of the institute’s Empirical Inference department and co-founder of Cyber Valley. “As Cyber Valley closes in on its fourth anniversary, our success at NeurIPS clearly shows that the research ecosystem’s academic and industrial partners are thriving and continue to gain momentum.”

Founded in December 2016 in southwestern Germany, Cyber Valley is Europe’s leading research consortium in the field of artificial intelligence. According to a recent ranking of the Criterio R&D blog based on number of publications at NeurIPS, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (14 papers) and the University of Tübingen (nine papers) are currently among Germany’s top three institutions in the field of machine learning. The University of Stuttgart and the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence in Renningen, both of whom are also Cyber Valley partners, are represented at NeurIPS 2020 with two and four papers, respectively. The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, which is located on the Max Planck research campus in Tübingen, has had one paper accepted to this year’s conference.

“Research excellence is the main reason why Cyber Valley keeps growing in leaps and bounds,” says Schölkopf. “It shapes the foundation of a unique AI ecosystem that also promotes innovation and entrepreneurship.” This ecosystem continued to evolve over the course of 2020, with the steady growth of the Cyber Valley Start-Up Network, the launch of the Investor Network, and the successful close of a fourth round of applications at the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS), the PhD program which was founded as part of Cyber Valley. In addition to this, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), which also has roots in Tübingen, launched an additional 13 research units at top institutions across Europe, taking the total to 30. ELLIS also recently expanded its international PhD program.

A full list of papers, authors, and their affiliations is available here.