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1. European Commission proposes new rules for trust in Artificial Intelligence
In April, the European Commission has released new rules in terms of a proposal for a regulatory framework for AI together with a revised coordinated plan for AI.
The new rules follow a risk based approach where unacceptable risk, high risk, limited and minimal risk applications are specified together with the conditions under which AI applications in these cases are applicable. The EU specifies cases of unacceptable risk which lead to a prohibition of AI applications: AI systems considered a clear threat to the safety, livelihoods and rights of people will be banned. This includes AI systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent users' free will (e.g. toys using voice assistance encouraging dangerous behaviour of minors) and systems that allow ‘social scoring' by governments. Also, the use of ‘real-time’ remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces for the purpose of law enforcement is prohibited unless certain objectives are met.
While this approach meets a range of desiderata formulated by NGOs, the specification of exceptions is rather vague. Criticism has also been directed towards the specification of the different risk settings—for example, health applications are not being listed as high-risk applications.
2. EU Commission adopts main work programme of Horizon Europe worth 14.7 billion €
In June, the European Commission has adopted the main work programme of Horizon Europe for the period 2021–2022, which outlines the objectives and specific topic areas that will receive a total of €14.7 billion in funding. These investments target the green and digital transitions and are supposed to contribute to sustainable recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and to EU resilience against future crises. They are directed towards European researchers through fellowships, training and exchanges, with the goal to build more connected and efficient European innovation ecosystems and create world-class research infrastructures. First calls open in June 2021.
5.8 billion € will be invested in research and innovation to support the European Green Deal, the development of core digital technologies will be supported with around €4 billion € over 2021–2022. Finally, it will direct investments of around €1.9 billion in total towards helping repair the immediate economic and social damage brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.
3. ELLIS network issues new calls
After a rather short-termed call of the ELLIS society for proposals for ELLIS Research Programs in June with a deadline in July the ELLIS network has issued a new call for PhD applications for its PhD Programm in 2022 with a deadline on 15. November 2021. The ELLIS PhD program is an important element of the ELLIS initiative and its goal is to foster and educate young talents in machine learning and related research areas by pairing students with leading academic and industrial researchers in Europe and offering a variety of networking and training activities, including summer schools and workshops.
4. EU and Adra sign public–private partnership to jointly invest 2.6 Billion Euro
On 23 June 2021, the European Commission and the newly established AI, Data and Robotics Association (Adra) signed a Memorandum of Understanding that establishes the co-programmed partnership that will serve as the European focal point for AI, Data and Robotics. The partnership leverages 1.3 billion € of public investments through the Horizon Europe programme, complemented with 1.3 billion € of private investments in the period 2021–2030 to address the key challenges in European AI, Data and Robotics.
Adra was founded on 21 May 2021 by three AI associations: CLAIRE, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), together with the Big Data Value Association (BDVA) and the European Robotics Association (euRobotics). These 5 European associations previously collaborated on the preparatory Joint Strategic Research Innovation and Deployment Agenda (SRIDA) that was released in September 2020. CLAIRE has played an important role in the negotiations that led to the creation of Adra, and will retain a leading role in the organisation, as reflected by the election of Morten Irgens as vice-president of the newly formed association.
5. Master in Artificial Intelligence for Public Services (AI4Gov)
The Master in Artificial Intelligence for Public Services (AI4Gov) is a new higher education programme funded by the European Union, and developed by four leading European universities in the fields of digital, technology, and engineering science. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (Germany) and the Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), based in Estonia's capital are the four higher education institutions behind the educational offer.
The programme is part of a wider initiative, in which university networks, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and top researchers have joined forces to offer new high-quality specialised Master programmes and courses in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The initiative is funded through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom programme and will bring advanced digital skills closer to non-technical people and other professionals, making a contribution to the target of 20 million information and communication technology (ICT) professionals by 2030, put forward in the European Commission's Digital Decade.
Calls
1 KI 2021—The 44th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Berlin, September 27–October 1, 2021
https://ki2021.uni-luebeck.de/
KI2021 is the 44th edition of the German conference on Artificial Intelligence organized in cooperation with the Fachbereich Künstliche Intelligenz der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI-SIG AI).
Due to the ongoing situation caused by the COVID19 pandemic and the given travel restrictions, the conference will take place in a digital format with remote participation for all events—the main conference, the workshops, and the doctoral consortium. Nonetheless, the accepted papers of the main conference will be published in a Springer proceedings volume as usual.
We are happy to announce the following prominent keynote speakers:
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Tristan Cazenave (LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL, CNRS and PRAIRIE Institute, France),
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Giuseppe De Giacomo (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy),
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Birte Glimm (University of Ulm, Germany),
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Kristian Kersting (CS Department, Centre for Cognitive Science, Hessian Center for AI (hessian.ai), TU Darmstadt, Germany)—joint talk with Informatik 2021,
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Katja Mombaur (Canada Excellence Research Chair in Human-Centred Robotics and Machine Intelligence, University of Waterloo, Canada), and
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Stuart Russell (Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA).
Registration is open. Up-to-date information about the program and all the elements of the conference can be found at the conference webpage. In the following we want to spotlight further events taking place during KI2021. More information can be found via the KI2021 webpage.
1.1 Workshops, Tutorial and Special Meetings
W1: 7th Workshop on Formal and Cognitive Reasoning (FCR-2021)
https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/wbs/fcr2021.html
Information for real life AI applications is usually pervaded by uncertainty and subject to change, and thus demands for non-classical reasoning approaches, possibly in combination with machine learning methods. Therefore, papers are solicited that provide a base for connecting formal-logical models of knowledge representation and cognitive models of reasoning and learning, addressing formal and experimental or heuristic issues.
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Christoph Beierle (University of Hagen, Germany)
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Marco Ragni (University of Freiburg, Germany)
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Frieder Stolzenburg (Harz University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
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Matthias Thimm (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)
W3: Trustworthy AI in the World
https://dataninja.nrw/?page_id=343
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is entering more and more our lives with the goal of supporting and helping us as humans in our homes, at our workplace, and as a society as such. As we want to benefit from these technologies, at the same time we want to be able to trust how AI technologies operate and to be able to understand their decisions. The goal of trustworthy AI, therefore, is to offer intelligent methods and agents that, on the one hand, produce robust and adaptive behavior in real world scenarios, and, on the other hand, are transparent in their decision making as they are able to justify and explain their decisions.
Trustworthy AI aims for technologies that not only provide solutions to an earlier defined task, but that as well allow for insight on the functioning of the underlying system. Why did the system acted in a certain way and did not choose a different solution? Which features were important for the decision and how sure is the system of its choice, i.e. can I trust this decision? The workshop aims, first, at understanding Machine Learning based approaches towards explainable AI solutions. Secondly, a focus of the workshop is on how we can make AI solutions more trustworthy.
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Barbara Hammer (Bielefeld University, Germany)
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Malte Schilling (Bielefeld University, Germany)
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Laurenz Wiskott (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany)
W4: WLP 2021—35th Workshop on (Constraint) Logic Programming
http://www.digitales-unternehmen.de/WLP2021
WLP 2021 provides a forum for exchanging ideas on declarative logic programming, constraint logic programming, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, and facilitates interactions between research in theoretical foundations and the design, implementation and application of (constraint) logic-based systems. Declarative approaches—especially in combination with other AI technologies and disruptive non-AI technologies—have an increasing relevance for digitalization projects in many sectors.
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Ulrich John (VICTORIA University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
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Petra Hofstedt (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany)
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Mario Wenzel (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
W5: Humanities-Centred AI (CHAI)
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/ki2021-chai
AI can support research in the Humanities making it easier and more efficient. It is thus essential that AI practitioners and Humanities scholars take a Humanities-centred approach to the development, deployment and application of AI methods for the Humanities.
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Sylvia Melzer (University of Hamburg, Germany)
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Stefan Thiemann (University of Hamburg, Germany)
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Jost Gippert (University of Frankfurt, Germany)
W6: Planen und Konfigurieren (PuK) @ KI 2021
The PuK workshop has its focus on Artificial Intelligence used in planning, scheduling, design and configuration. With the actual hype in Artificial Intelligence applications these application domains are even more interesting. So the PuK provides a forum for presentation and discussion on these topics.
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Jürgen Sauer (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
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Stefan Edelkamp (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic)
W7: Artificial Intelligence and Ethics
https://ki2021-ai-ethics.github.io/
The omnipresence of intelligent machines poses substantial ethical and legal challenges. Therefore, in order, to ensure the beneficence of autonomous agents towards humans (and other machines), we need to introduce ethical and legal mechanisms that govern and align actions executed by AI-based algorithms according to our societal ethical and moral norms. The aim of this workshop "Artificial Intelligence and Ethics" is therefore primarily to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between the individual disciplines, such that the state of research of the respective discipline can be understood by the participants and conceptual ambiguities, which exist especially in interdisciplinary projects, can be cleared up. As organisers we hope that our workshop will help to establish a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration and will pave the way to find a common ground among these disciplines such that a roadmap towards ethics-aware Artificial Intelligence can be proposed.
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Andreas Hein (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
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Mark Schweda (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
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Silke Schicktanz (University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany)
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Stefan Teipel (Rostock University Medical Center, Germany)
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Thomas Kirste (University of Rostock, Germany)
T2: Deep Learning Workflows for Biomedial Signal Data—a Practical Example
In this half-day tutorial, we'll use real-world ECG datasets to demonstrate deep learning approaches in MATLAB to show sequence-to-sequence classification frameworks for 1-D signals. The target audience of this tutorial are practitioners of artificial intelligence interested in workflow discussions based on hands-on examples. The presented workflows generalize beyond ECG datasets to other types of signals and time-series data. There are no prerequisites other than general knowledge of deep learning methodologies.
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Christoph Stockhammer (The MathWorks GmbH, Germany)
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Mihaela Jarema (The MathWorks GmbH, Germany)
S1: CLAIRE National Meeting @ KI 2021
Trusted AI—unattainable vision or social mission? Opportunity or burden? How can it be implemented? Such questions are the focus of the first meeting of the German chapter of CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe. Trusted AI puts a special emphasis on providing (verifiable) guarantees for the correct functioning of modern AI-based systems, and in this sense it significantly strengthens the more unspecific notion of Trustworthy AI. The meeting brings CLAIRE members together with representatives from industry, politics and academia and offers all interested parties the opportunity to get in touch with CLAIRE, learn about CLAIRE's mission and discuss the topic of Trusted AI.
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Christoph Benzmüller (Freie Universität Berlin, German National Contact Point for CLAIRE, Germany)
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Philip Slussalek (CLAIRE Director of Strategy, Wissenschaftlicher Direktor DFKI, Germany)
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Janina Hoppstädter (CLAIRE office, DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany)
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Daniel Krupka (Geschäftsführung der Gesellschaft für Informatik, e.V., Germany)
S2: Meeting of the task force AI in Education (AK KiS) within the section on AI (FBKI) at KI 2021
https://cogsys.uni-bamberg.de/events/KiSKickOff/
The newly established task force KiS aims at initiating and establishing the discourse of AI experts with experts on computer science education on central topics and methods of AI and educational concepts for introducing them in school. The kick-off meeting at KI 2021 invites all members of the AI community interested in teaching AI. The meeting will start with short highlight talks from members of the KiS steering committee. Teachers and education managers interested in AI education have been invited. In an open discussion, we plan to identify core points of interest and action points. Attendees are encouraged to become a member of the AK KiS.
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Ute Schmid (University of Bamberg, Germany)
Early Career Research Consortium
https://ki2021.uni-luebeck.de/call_doctoral_consortium.html
The early career research consortium provides young researchers from any subject area within AI with the opportunity to present their ideas and receive feedback at an early stage of at their scientific work. In contrast to previous editions, we also invite young researchers to present their research and connect with new researchers. The early career research consortium also provides an opportunity for young researchers to discuss their research interests and career objectives with established researchers in AI and network with other participants. The young-researchers consortium will expose students to different areas of research within AI and help build professional connections within the international community of AI researchers.
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Sylvia Melzer (University of Hamburg, Germany)
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News. Künstl Intell 36, 109–112 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-021-00741-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-021-00741-7