The Institute for Machine Learning and the LIT AI Lab (JKU) as well as the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) in Lower Austria have been selected as two Austrian research institutions to become an ELLIS location.
Professor Sepp Hochreiter (JKU) and Professor Christoph Lampert (IST Austria) noted: This is proof of conducting high quality research in this area. ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) aims to develop a European network to support and network institutes of excellence as well as strengthen and foster groundbreaking base-knowledge research in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Deep Learning.
Professor Christoph Lampert, coordinator of ELLIS at IST Austria, remarked: "Developments in machine learning will impact us all and our entire society. Base-knowledge research will be the key to not only understand what modern machine learning systems do, but also why. We cannot leave the answers to these questions to researchers in America and Asia – European researchers and scientists must also play a leading role." Lampert's research group is exploring how to make machine learning methods more controllable, accountable, and trustworthy. These are methods that are also used in automatic image recognition.
Sepp Hochreiter, head of the Institute for Machine Learning at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and member of the ELLIS director’s board, explains: "In addition to 16 other units, the JKU and LIT AI Lab can celebrate well-earned success having been selected from across Europe based on scientific and academic excellence in the field of AI and machine learning. By combining Deep Learning with high computing power and large amounts of data, we have succeeded in driving AI innovation in industry and shaping the world of tomorrow. The newly created ELLIS Units are the best way to achieve this goal in order to maintain prosperity and European values. The ELLIS Units support developing, producing, and retaining top AI specialists, particularly in machine learning. This is the reason why the ELLIS Units are a milestone in the European AI initiative and will continue shaping Europe’s future in AI, helping to make our lives better."