The ELLIS Unit Linz is comprised of seven ELLIS faculty members, including Martina Seidl. The Unit also includes the two ELLIS members Johannes Brandstetter and Werner Zellinger, ELLIS scholar Günter Klambauer as well as the three ELLIS fellows Sepp Hochreiter, Gerhard Widmer and Johannes Fürnkranz.
The ELLIS PhD and PostDoc program, opens an external URL in a new window educates ELLIS PhD candidates and also provides a post-doctoral education program for some of the best junior researchers in this field.

The LIT AI Lab/ ELLIS Unit Linz Seminar launched in the summer of 2021, bringing researchers and students interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence together. Click here to learn more.

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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. ELLIS aims to provide European researchers with outstanding opportunities to conduct their research in Europe, thereby supporting the next generation of junior European researchers in this strategically important field. The goal is to keep Europe competitive in the field of modern AI and benefit from a more positive economic and societal impact.

ELLIS' mission will benefit Europe in two ways:

• We want to conduct high quality base-knowledge research in Europe, thereby enabling Europe to drive the direction of machine learning and modern AI and understand its global impact.
• We want to create an economic impact and jobs in Europe, which we believe can be accomplished by independently conducting outstanding, base-knowledge research, aside from the interest of industries.

At the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on December 11, 2019 (a leading international conference on machine learning), ELLIS announced it would establish an initial 17 ELLIS units across 10 European countries and Israel. The recently established research units, centered around outstanding AI researchers, will address underlying AI challenges focusing on research excellence and social impact. An open call generated 28 proposals from 13 countries, each of which pledged local funding of a minimum of EUR 1.5 million per year for no less than five years, including 20% reserved for ELLIS activities such as student and faculty exchange and organizing joint ELLIS research programs and workshops.

An international evaluation committee selected the 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 Zurich (ETH Zurich) based on proven scientific merit and implementing measures in line with the ELLIS mission. In an effort to avoid any conflicts of interest, all of the peer reviews were conducted by scientists and scholars from countries other than the targeted institutions. The list of ELLIS unit leaders 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.

Turing Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Engineering Fellow at Google, and one of the leading scientists in the field of artificial intelligence, states that: "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."

Several European companies have indicated their support for this initiative, including Audi, AVL, Bayer, Bosch, DeepMind, Greiner, Porsche, Siemens, as well as U.S. companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and the Canadian startup Elemen.