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Three additional chairs for CAIDAS

On May 15, 2020, the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and Art announced the results of the AI competition in the "AI and Supertech" program of the High-Tech Agenda. In this program, 50 additional chairs were awarded to universities and universities of applied sciences within the Bavarian AI network.

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CAIDAS Würzburg

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science (DaS) are key methologies of our century. For the first time, data is not only digitally stored, transmitted and processed by AI, but also understood and linked in terms of content, so that decisions can be drawn knowledge-based and partly or fully automated. It can be assumed that artificial intelligence methods will play an even greater role in the future than they do today.
The Center for Artificial Intelligence in Data Science (CAIDaS) of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg will conduct research on these processes and offer teaching courses. In addition to the further development of AI methods, new research topics are to be developed and the transfer into applications is to be demanded through close links with the various scientific fields of the university. In addition, social aspects will likewise be comprehensively examined.

Contact

Chair of Data Science (Informatik X)
Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg

 

E-Mail: hotho[at]informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de

Center Structure

CAIDAS will bundle and expand the activities of the JMU in the areas of research and teaching of AI. In addition to the previous focus on AI method development, this aims to create synergies with the participating specialist sciences and users in the free enterprise sector. Social issues are thus also moved into the focus of the center. 
In order to ensure the integration of AI method development and scientific applications, the chairs provided by the Free State of Bavaria for the center are supplemented with additional tandem chairs by the faculties of the JMU. In biology the tandem structure is formed by the Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology (CCTB).
The thematic orientation of the new chairs reflects the breadth of possible areas of application for AI methods. Expertises already available at the JMU were thus integrated and local connecting factors taken into account. The faculties with a tandem chair were intensively involved in the exact selection of topics for the chairs.

Members

 

Challenges

AI research is concerned with the development of computers and algorithms that possess intellectual abilities comparable to those of humans. Even if this goal is far from being reached, one basically wants to build a machine - a computer - that can solve problems like humans and is constantly evolving.
The computer can evaluate larger amounts of data considerably faster than humans. The core task is the further development of methods and algorithms that are able to analyse data as independently as possible from humans, to learn models, to link them with known empirical knowledge, to exchange information and knowledge with the environment or people and to adapt to new situations in order to solve the task. In addition to progress in computer hardware, the main drivers of further development are new methods of machine learning, data science and knowledge processing.
Today, the raw material "data" can be obtained with a degree of detail that was previously not accessible. This applies not only to social media, smartphones and the web, but also to medicine, archaeology, biology, life sciences, remote sensing, financial markets and industrial value creation and logistics networks. 
The combination of methods and the large amount of data results in diverse fields of application not only in science, but also in all areas of the economy. The training of young minds in the field of AI is therefore just as important to the center as excellent research. More