6th Thuringian AI Forum: Artificial intelligence as an engine for Thuringia

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’Engineering for Smart Manufacturing’ is one of the topics of the AI
’Engineering for Smart Manufacturing’ is one of the topics of the AI Forum in Erfurt
In the case of an acute heart attack, it ensures optimized communication between the arriving emergency services and the hospital to be reached; it actively supports logistics companies in improving route plans or helps to recover heat from wastewater: Artificial intelligence (AI) is now providing new solutions in a wide variety of areas. Thuringian players are currently working on the projects described, and these projects are part of the program of the 6th Thuringian AI Forum. The event will take place on Tuesday, October 29, 2024, from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the COMCENTER Brühl of the State Development Corporation of Thuringia (Erfurt).

Organized by the Thüringer Zentrum für Lernende Systeme und Robotik and the Thüringer ClusterManagement of LEG Thüringen, the symposium offers all’interested parties the opportunity to get to know Thuringia’s expertise in artificial intelligence in science and industry and to find out about current developments. The AI Forum also serves to promote networking within the Thuringian AI and robotics community and brings together AI developers and potential users.

One highlight of the event will be the keynote speech by Prof. Wolfram Burgard. The university lecturer and researcher at the Technical University of Nuremberg is a proven expert in the field of AI-based mobile assistance robotics and is one of the "top ten" most important and best-known roboticists in the world. He will be speaking on the topic of "Artificial intelligence and robotics - key technologies for the future". On the other hand, AI will be particularly visible and in some cases even "tangible" through a broad and exciting demonstrator exhibition: participants will experience robots that communicate with them, a robot dog will roam the grounds, an application from Jena-based rooom AG will conjure up artistic landscapes on the virtual screen based on visitors’ drawings, and a demo bus from Spleenlab GmbH from Saalburg-Ebersdorf will illustrate exciting aspects of autonomous driving.

The event will be opened by Andreas Krey, Managing Director of LEG, and Prof. Horst-Michael Groß, Director of the Thüringer Zentrum für Lernende Systeme und Robotik (TZLR). The TZLR, which is funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation and the Free State of Thuringia, is a joint institution for Thuringian universities and research institutes with a focus on the TU Ilmenau and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.

Scientific innovations in Thuringia will be presented at the forum. In addition to the aforementioned applications in the fields of emergency medicine, logistics and wastewater heat recovery, this also includes the use of mobile robots in industrial production, new solutions in the field of autonomous driving and the facilitation of official measures, for example in the allocation of funding. Prof. Horst-Michael Groß will also be presenting the results of the "Engineering for Smart Manufacturing" research project at TU Ilmenau. In this interdisciplinary project, scientists researched innovative technologies for the intelligent manufacturing and assembly of the future. The core idea: with the help of artificial intelligence, robots learn from the actions of humans and independently adapt their own actions to those of humans - particularly important for multi-variant assembly in small batches.

The AI Forum will not only present the latest AI science to participants in the morning - in the afternoon, best-practice examples and reports from the world of business will also help to demystify AI and sensitize industry representatives to the use of AI technologies in their own companies. Each of the best practice examples comes from one of Thuringia’s five innovation fields, which are being further developed and promoted as part of the Regional Innovation Strategy (RIS Thuringia). Participants at the AI Forum can also find out about the legal framework that regulates the use of artificial intelligence in the European Union. At the end of the event, the Zentrum Digitale Transformation Thüringen (ZeTT) will present the results of a special survey on the use of AI in small and medium-sized enterprises in the Free State of Thuringia.

The AI Forum is one of Thuringia’s largest events on the topic of artificial intelligence. It takes place in the InnoLOG conference format, one of the four event formats of the Thüringer ClusterManagements (ThCM). The ThCM works on behalf of the Free State of Thuringia (Thuringian Ministry of Economics, Science and Digital Society) and is co-financed with funds from the European Union (EFRE).