Philipp Slusallek, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

Philipp Slusallek, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

We are in this situation where AI has been a very fragmented area in Europe, which is very different, for example Google brings things together, Baidu and the Chinese government on the other side while Europe has a lot of groups all over the place with perhaps an exception at DFKI. We felt that if we really want to move things and really be competitive we need to bring the community together. Even the biggest organisations like DFKI which is the largest research centre in AI worldwide, we can’t do this alone.

This is why we started CLAIRE, which is a confederation of labs in AI in Europe. We have 260 or more labs, almost 3000 individual supporters., so there is a really momentum building and under this big umbrella we are arguing for this network of labs and a CERN for AI as a trademark. In that context of Claire one big element is research and this is why we started this Humane AI as the really big research initiate in the Claire context in Europe tor really create major breakthroughs with all the top people in AI in Europe and make sure they don’t go to the US and maybe even bring some of them back to Europe.

My specific project is the digital reality, it’s the idea of modelling the world. We do this mostly for autonomous driving mostly right now. We are modelling how pedestrians are moving. As humans we never this if a pedestrian will move or stop at the edge, we know, right, we see the subtle changes. Can we model that to create artificial synthetic scenes that incorporate these fine subtle changes in human motion so we can train them into AI systems. We can use these models to create test cases to make sure that a future autonomous car is actually detecting this and will not kill a pedestrian. Its really the validation of AI systems through modelling the environment, sing this for training and other purposes. It’s a large scale thing and applies to any AI system where you can model the environment it interacts, but autonomous driving is really a key element that we are looking at right now.