In summer 2021 the LIT AI Lab/ ELLIS Unit Linz Seminar has kicked off, which shall bring together researchers and students interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Here you can find more information.

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The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent systems (ELLIS) is a pan-European effort initiated in 2018 to foster European research excellence in machine learning and related fields. It aims to offer European researchers outstanding opportunities to carry out their research in Europe, and to nurture the next generation of European young researchers in this field of strategic importance. Its goal is to enable Europe to be competitive in modern AI and benefit from positive economic and societal impact.

ELLIS´ mission ist to benefit Europe in two ways:

• We want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world.
• We want to have economic impact and create jobs in Europe, and believe this is achieved by outstanding and free basic research, independent of industry interests.

On December 11th 2019 at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the leading international conference on machine learning, ELLIS announced the establishment of the first 17 ELLIS units across 10 European countries and Israel. Built around outstanding AI researchers, the newly established research units are devoted to tackling fundamental challenges in AI with a focus on research excellence and societal impact. An open call resulted in 28 proposals from 13 countries, each of which committed local funding of at least 1.5 Mio € per year for at least five years, 20% thereof reserved for ELLIS network activities such as student and faculty exchanges and the organization of joint ELLIS research programs and workshops. Proposals from Alicante, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Delft, Freiburg, Helsinki, Linz (LIT AI Laboratory), Lausanne, Leuven, Oxford, Prague, Saarbrücken, Tel Aviv, Tübingen, Vienna (IST Austria) and Zürich (ETH Zürich) were selected by an international evaluation committee, based on proven scientific excellence and the implementation of measures to foster the ELLIS mission. To avoid conflicts of interest, all the reviews were done by scientists of countries different from the units being evaluated. The list of directors of ELLIS units includes European researchers such as Wolfram Burgard, Sepp Hochreiter, Thomas Hofmann, Sami Kaski, Nuria Oliver, Bernhard Schölkopf, Yee Whye Teh, Luc van Gool and Max Welling.

Geoffrey Hinton, Turing Award winner, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, an engineering Fellow at Google and one of the leading scientists in AI, says: "Deep learning is at the core of the staggering progress we are witnessing in AI today. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are investing billions in developing this technology. If Europe wants to keep up with North America and China, it needs to focus its major AI investments on deep learning."

A number of European companies have already stated their support of this initiative, including Audi, AVL, Bayer, Bosch, DeepMind, Greiner, Porsche, Siemens as well as US companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and the Canadian startup Element AI.

Topic:

Large-scale ligand-based virtual screening for potential SARS-Cov-2 inhibitors using a deep neural network

Team:

• Markus Hofmarcher
• Andreas Mayr
• Elisabeth Rumetshofer
• Philipp Renz
• Philipp Seidl
• Andreu Vall
• Michael Widrich
• Sepp Hochreiter
• Guenter Klambauer