Hector Fellow Bernhard Schölkopf becomes founding director of the ELLIS Institute in Tübingen
With the ceremonial signing of a funding agreement in Stuttgart’s Neues Schloss on Thursday, Baden-Württemberg’s Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann, Science Minister Theresia Bauer, Dr. h. c. Hans-Werner Hector, Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf and Prof. Bernd Engler, President of the University of Tübingen, gave the official go-ahead for the establishment of Europe’s first ELLIS Institute at the Cyber Valley campus in Tübingen.
The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) aims to secure the lasting competitiveness of European AI by pooling the expertise of top researchers in machine learning and related fields across the continent.
The ELLIS Institute in Tübingen will be funded by the Hector Foundation with a total of 100 million euros over the next ten years. The state of Baden-Württemberg is contributing an additional 25 million euros.
The research focus in Tübingen is on building learning systems that approach the versatility and robustness of natural intelligent systems. Many AI-based applications are locked into a specific problem, but stop working when that problem changes. They cannot recognize causal relationships. Research is underway in Tübingen on approaches to close this gap.
“Future systems will deal with the complexity of the world by learning from observations – from astronomy to climate research to medicine. We created Cyber Valley and the ELLIS initiative to help shape them,” notes Bernhard Schölkopf.