A few weeks ago, before the official announcement was made, Nuria Oliver, the fourth woman to enter the Royal Academy of Engineering in Spain, and who does not stop grabbing awards, now also internationally, sends me a message and It says: “Please, echo the information I send you and it will be made official in a few days.” He shares with me some information about ELLIS, a non-profit organization that aims to establish a network of European research laboratories in the field of machine learning, one of the fields of artificial intelligence (AI).
ELLIS programs are transnational research projects, each led by two or three leading machine learning (ML) scientists. Each team focuses on an area that has the potential to develop modern artificial intelligence, which will allow Europe to shape the technological and social revolution of AI in the Old Continent.
As a result of an international review process led by Yoshua Bengio, professor at the University of Montreal, with the help of the CIFAR Brain and Machine Learning Program, 11 ELLIS programs were selected. The Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg in Germany finances them with one million euros. Using this funding, each ELLIS program is able to organize one workshop in 2019 and two in 2020. Cyber Valley will co-host the workshops, many of which will be held in Baden-Württemberg, at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics.
Each ELLIS program brings together around 10-15 outstanding researchers who have made a name for themselves at one of the leading ML research institutions in Europe, including ETH Zürich, Cambridge, Oxford, the Universities of Amsterdam and Tübingen, the research institute French for Digital Sciences (INRIA) and several Max Planck Institutes.
Study areas of each program
Each program focuses on a high-impact problem area. For example, they investigate the principles and methods of robust machine learning, quantum machine learning, how to connect classical algorithms of computer vision and modern machine learning, or how the sensory and motor behavior of robots that interact with the physical world can be improved through ML approaches.
There are also ELLIS programs dealing with human-centered deep learning (DL), where researchers study how ML approaches can be incorporated to help ensure the benefits and widespread public acceptance of transparency, clear accountability, interpretability, and fairness of algorithmic decisions.
Health and climate change
Another program is titled “ELLIS Health”, where approaches are implemented to improve disease diagnosis using artificial intelligence. And perhaps most pressing, a team is investigating how machine learning can be used to better model and understand the Earth system and help understand and reduce the effects of climate change.
In San Sebastián, where the ELLIS programs were held last September, the winners of the first six ELLIS PhD awards were announced. The awards are sponsored by the Kühborth Stiftung GmbH, and have been established to recognize and encourage research achievements during the dissertation phase of outstanding students working in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, including related fields such as machine vision. computer and robotics.
This is how ELLIS came about
ELLIS was started in April 2018 in an open letter published by some of Europe’s leading AI scientists, warning that machine learning was at the heart of a technological and social revolution in which Europe was in danger of being left behind. To meet this challenge, the scientists emphasized that leading research centers in Europe should join forces. An inspiration for ELLIS came from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Europe’s flagship laboratory for life sciences, an intergovernmental organization with more than 80 independent research groups operating from six sites across Europe.
ELLIS aspiration is to become the world’s leading open science artificial intelligence organization, enabling Europe to play a major role in the current scientific and social revolution of AI by attracting leading machine learning scientists and empowering them to generate innovation. scientific, economic and social. In the future, this European research network will be a premier employer in the field of machine learning and adjacent fields, and a leading institution for next generation training and education. In addition to the recently launched ELLIS Programs, so-called “ELLIS Institutes” and “ELLIS Units” will be established throughout Europe.
