"One Munich Strategy": Software technology for cognitive systems

4/3/2019

A new Fraunhofer Institute for software technologies for cognitive systems will be led by professors from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) at the Garching research campus. Six new professorships are being created to cover the assignments of the new institute, four of which will be at TUM. The institute is being created as a part of the Bavarian Competence Network for Artificial Machine Intelligence.

Campus Garching — The new institute will be located on the Garching campus. (Image: ediundsepp Gestaltungsgesellschaft mbH)

The new institute combines the partners' complementary strengths in fundamental research and application research. In 2017 TUM founded the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM), headed by Prof. Sami Haddadin, for interdisciplinary research on artificial intelligence and robotics for the future of the fields health, occupation and mobility. TUM will now create four additional professorships at MSRM that will be staffed jointly with Fraunhofer. Two of these professorships will lead the new Fraunhofer Institute, locates in Garching. Initial focus topics will be resilient cognitive systems and artificial intelligence for autonomous systems.

State of Bavaria supports competence network

The institute will work within the recently formed Competence Network for Artificial Machine Intelligence, a partnership which includes LMU Munich, the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Leibniz Supercomputing Center in addition to TUM and Fraunhofer. The Bavarian state government created the network in June 2018 during a cabinet meeting at TUM as part of the "Bayern Digital II" master plan. The partners also intend to integrate their network in the AI strategy of the German federal government.

TUM is also further intensifying its personnel ties with the Helmholtz Association in the field of AI: Fabian Theis, Professor for Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems, recently took over as head of the Germany-wide Helmholtz Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Unit.