ELLIS Munich-Delft Meetup
In an effort to make new and strengthen existing connections, a delegation of ELLIS Unit Delft visited ELLIS Munich and some of the most renowned AI research institutions in Munich area on the 25th and 26th of January 2024. The delegation consisted of people from TU Delft’s cognitive robotics department, and the sequential decision making group.
From left to right: Julian Kooij, Frans Oliehoek, Holger Caesar, Javier Alonso-Mora, Jens Kober.
The networking trip started with a visit to Prof. Dr. Daniel Cremers’ lab at TUM where Prof. Dr. Cremers gave an overview of major projects in his lab over the past ten years, including early work on SLAM technology and developments in DM-VIO: Delayed Marginalization Visual-Inertial Odometry. PhD candidate Qadeer Khan demoed the technology. The participants engaged in an open discussion touching on aspects such as 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 a visit to the Institute of Automotive Technology, where a number of 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. 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, emphasizing 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 26th of January, the Delft delegations also 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 networking trip concluded with a visit to DLR, where Dr. Freek Stulp, the head of Cognitive Robotics at DLR, had organized a number of demos showcasing their diverse facilities and recent advances in machine learning for robotics.
In conclusion, the visit has resulted in new personal connections, strengthening the ties between the Munich and Delft AI ecosystems, and specifically in areas of ML, vision and robotics. Additionally, reflection on the commonalities and differences between the units will feed into new ideas on how to shape the future of our ELLIS units and improve cohesion in the network as whole.