Research into the future technology of artificial intelligence (AI) will significantly boost from July 1, 2022. Five of the total six German AI competence centers, previously funded as projects for a limited period, will now be made permanent with institutional funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the participating German states. The federal government and the states where the centers are located will provide up to 100 million euros annually. The aim is to establish European and internationally competitive research that will sustainably strengthen Germany as a leading location for research, teaching, and technology transfer in AI.

By making the AI competence centers permanent, the German government is continuing its national strategy for artificial intelligence adopted in 2018 and building on the successes of recent years. “The AI competence centers are a mainstay of AI research in Germany,” says Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger. “With the continuation of their funding by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Länder, we are giving researchers planning security and the opportunity to work intensively on longer-term and more complex issues. In this way, we are making Germany even more attractive as an AI location. In addition, the research results should benefit people as quickly as possible – such as improved early detection of cancer. That is why another important task of the AI competence centers is to promote research transfer and also the international networking of the German AI landscape. European cooperation is particularly important in this key technology.”

The five AI competence centers at universities and non-university research institutions were successfully evaluated by an international panel of experts in 2021. They will receive a new foundation with the continuation: the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Dresden/Leipzig (ScaDS. AI Dresden/Leipzig), the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), the Tübingen AI Center (TUE.AI) and the Rhine-Ruhr Machine Learning Competence Center (ML2R), which will be transformed into the “Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence”. Together with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), these six AI competence centers jointly form the nucleus of German AI research.

The permanent funding provided by the BMBF and the participating federal states enables the centers to pursue a long-term research strategy, recruit and train internationally renowned scientists, and bring AI technologies “Made in Germany” directly to companies. The federal government will provide the newly established AI competence centers with up to 50 million euros annually starting in 2022. The participating states of Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saxony will match the funding. Transferring to permanent institutions creates a solid foundation for building excellence in research, education, and development. The BMBF will also fund the DFKI in the future with up to eleven million euros per year, supplemented by funding totaling the same amount from its host states. The competence centers will thus receive the financial means to keep up with the international competition for the best brains and to anchor AI research in Germany in the long term.

Well-networked cutting-edge research develops a radiance that benefits the respective regions and Germany: Well-trained experts attract companies and startups that advance technology transfer and develop new products and services from scientific findings. The centers directly address the pressing issues of the economy, such as the digital transformation of industrial production and the need for innovation in environmental and climate protection or medicine. Conversely, proximity to practice also strengthens science by enabling it to work with real data. The orientation towards European values, standards, and guidelines forms a common basis for the scientific work of the centers. Thus, the permanent funding of the AI competence centers means another important step toward a European AI that is trustworthy, used responsibly, and secures the technological sovereignty of the European economy.

For their long-term strategic networking, the competence centers are building on the successfully established cooperation from recent years. Joint presentations at high-level scientific conferences, active German-French cooperation, and joint activities at the national level have laid the foundation for intensive scientific collaboration and a broad, complementary content and technological orientation of their research strategies.

With its locations in Dresden and Leipzig, ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig combines the excellent AI and data science expertise of the Technische Universität Dresden, the University of Leipzig, and ten non-university research institutions. With the understanding of its methods and trust in its results, up to 12 new AI professorships and an additional Humboldt Professorship will be filled at the partner universities during the new funding period to advance the penetration and usability of AI further. In the future, the center will conduct research on 17 research topics within five interrelated key areas of AI, Big Data, and Data Science:

• Analytics and Engineering of Big Data
• Methods and algorithms of AI
• Applications of Big Data and AI
• Responsible AI
• Architectures, scalability, and security

ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig aims to bridge the gap between the efficient use of mass data, knowledge management, and advanced AI. For this reason, the center conducts interdisciplinary research with an international team of renowned scientists*. The focus is on rapidly transferring research results into scientific and business applications. As an integral part of the center, the Transfer and Service Center is a key factor for new collaborations and successful transfer activities in numerous projects with users from science as well as industry.

“The institutionalization confirms the successful work of ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig in recent years and the research strength and excellence already achieved in the field of Data Science and AI. Our goal is to advance this excellence with additional professorships and junior research groups both in basic AI research and in data-intensive application fields such as life sciences and earth sciences,” says Prof. Dr. Erhard Rahm and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel, Directors.

• scads.ai