ELLIS Munich-Delft Meetup
On the 25th and 26th of January 2024, a delegation of ELLIS Unit Delft visited ELLIS Munich and some of the most renowned AI research institutions in Munich area. The delegation consisted of members of the TU Delft’s cognitive robotics department, and the sequential decision making group. The visit was a great opportunity to make new personal connections, strengthen ties between the Munich and Delft AI ecosystems, and specifically in areas of machine learning (ML), vision and robotics.
The networking trip started with a visit to Prof. Dr. Daniel Cremers’ lab at TUM where he gave an overview of major projects in his lab over the past ten years, covering early work on SLAM technology and developments in DM-VIO: Delayed Marginalization Visual-Inertial Odometry. PhD candidate Qadeer Khan even gave a demo of the technology. Then, everyone engaged in an open discussion about topics like the need for computational resources and the extent to which it is appropriate that the quality of academic work is assessed based on access to such resources. The afternoon ended with visiting the Institute of Automotive Technology, where several AI-driven road vehicles were presented, and a meeting with Prof. Dr.-Ing Johannes Betz was held to discuss how research and education are aligned at TUM and TUD.
In the evening, there was a special occasion of the ELLIS Munich meetup, hosted by ELLIS Munich and the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Munich. The attendees included high level scientists from TUM, LMU, MCML, MIRMI and Helmholtz Munich, along with participants from Baiosphere. Unit directors Prof. Dr. Fabian Theis and Prof. Daniel Cremers introduced the ELLIS Munich, highlighting the unit's diversity, past activities, and future plans. Unit director Dr. Frans Oliehoek introduced the Delft Unit, with a focus on the bridge that the unit aims to build between Delft’s engineering scientists and the ELLIS members both in Delft and the wider European network. The formal part of the program ended with a group discussion on foundation models, emphasising opportunities, as well as needs and limitations in different research areas. Importantly, the ELLIS units also exchanged their experiences for creating events and activities to support their students and researchers, generating new ideas to strengthen the units and the network as a whole.
On the next day, the Delft delegations visited the argmax research group (Volkswagen) led by ELLIS Fellow Prof. Dr. Patrick van der Smagt, where synergies in the area of model-based reinforcement learning for robotics were explored. The trip ended with a visit to DLR, where Dr. Freek Stulp, the head of Cognitive Robotics at DLR, had organised a number of demos showcasing their diverse facilities and recent advances in ML for robotics.
This meetup was a good opportunity to reflect on the commonalities and differences between the units, and how this will feed into new ideas on how to shape the future of our ELLIS units and improve cohesion in the network as whole.
The mission of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) is to create a diverse European network that promotes research excellence and advances breakthroughs in AI, as well as a pan-European PhD program to educate the next generation of AI researchers. ELLIS also aims to boost economic growth in Europe by leveraging AI technologies. In november 2019, ELLIS selected TU Delft as one of the units.
The ELLIS Delft Unit focuses on using learning techniques as a key enabling technology to deal with complex tasks, and making intelligent systems adapt to their environment including social circumstances.