Noémie Jaquier, PostDoc at the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR), is one of ten newcomers honoured by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.) at the international AI Camp 2023 on 26 April 2023 for their research work and extraordinary commitment in the field of artificial intelligence. Her research brings a new perspective to robot learning, optimisation and control by using Riemannian geometry as an inductive bias and developing data-efficient algorithms with solid theoretical guarantees.

Due to unexpected circumstances, unfortunately we have to cancel the talk of Peter Corke,  Distinguished Professor of Robotic Vision at Queensland University of Technology, Australia on Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 11.30.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Anne Koziolek (KIT - KASTEL) and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Steffen Becker (University Stuttgart) received the teaching fellowship for “Lehrinnovationen und Unterstützungsangebote in der digitalen Hochschullehre Baden-Württemberg”. The Fellowship is funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg and the Stifterverband. Professor Koziolek and Professor Becker received the funding for their collaboration in the project "Transfer of an innovative programming education with Mini Programming Worlds (TiPMin)".

On January 30, 2023 the KCIST presented its research activities at Karlsruhe City Hall. The citizens expected exciting lectures by KIT scientists around the guiding theme "The Age of Data and Artificial Intelligence". The Lord Mayor of Karlsruhe, the President of KIT and the scientific spokesperson of KCIST cordially invited to the event.

Professor Marius Kloft from the University of Kaiserslautern gave a talk about "Deep Anomaly Detection" on Friday, December 9, 2022 at 10:30 at the Karlsruher Decision and Design Laboratory - KD2Lab, in Bldg. 01.85 (Zähringer-Haus).

Marius Kloft has worked and researched at various institutions in Germany and the US and is a Professor of Machine Learning at TU Kaiserslautern since 2017.

On Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 11:30 in bldg. 50.34 room -101, Prof. Arun Rajkumar from IIT Madras gave a talk about the problem of learning to rank from a set of pairwise comparisons.

Arun Rajkumar is currently an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering department of IIT Madras and leads the Machine Learning Theory lab at IITM.

As part of the European Robotics Week 2022, the Chair of High-Performance Humanoid Technologies (KIT, Adenauerring 2, Geb. 50.20, EG) opened its doors on November 25, 2022 from 13:00 - 17:00.

Interested citizens were able to get an insight into the current research on intelligent, humanoid robots to support humans in everyday life and work.

In addition to the laboratory tour, guests had the opportunity to get hands-on and interact with various humanoid robots.

The paper “SpeedFolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments” by the authors Yahav Avigal (UC Berkeley), Lars Berscheid, Tamim Asfour, Torsten Kroeger (KIT - IAR) and Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley) was awarded with the Best Conference Award as well as the Best RoboCup Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan.
Folding garments efficiently is a long standing challenge in robotic manipulation. The researchers primary contribution is a novel neural network architecture that is able to predict two corresponding poses to identify a set of bimanual action primitives for garments folding. After learning from 4300 human actions, the robot is able to fold garments in under 120s on average with a success rate of 93%. 

On October 04, 2022 from 19:30 - 21:00, an online lecture entitled "Artificial intelligence in medicine - How can its potential be used responsibly?" with subsequent discussion will be held as part of the "acatech on Tuesday" event series in collaboration with vhs.wissen live. The speaker will be Prof. Dr. Peter Dabrock, Professor of Systematic Theology (Ethics) at Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Using the example of applications of AI in the health care system, the opportunities as well as possible problems of artificial intelligence will be discussed.
Participation in the event is free of charge. Registration is required by October 3, 2022.

All KIT researchers and interested parties are invited to participate in the workshop on "AI Engineering" organized by Professor Beigl (TECO) and his staff on September 23, 2022 at the Triangel Open Space.

This workshop tries to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the topic of Engineering AI and Engineering AI systems from many viewpoints and perspectives. The overall outcome of the workshop will be a short position paper summarizing different aspects and viewpoints of Engineering AI.

Free of charge, registration is required.

Germany’s best-endowed research prize was awarded to computing expert André Platzer who is coming to KIT as a Humboldt Professor for artificial intelligence. His research is about making computer assistance systems for trains and aircrafts extremely safe. At KIT, Platzer will assume the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Logic of Autonomous Dynamical Systems and head the new Institute for Reliability of Autonomous Dynamical Systems, where he will seek synergies for the application of reliable CPS in other fields.

Making AI systems more robust and secure with the help of artificial data - this is what the start-up Aimino Tech GmbH, founded in March 2021, is working on. Until now, a lack of data has limited system performance in many AI projects. As a result, they block the use of AI solutions in industry. Aimino's solution closes this data gap by producing synthetic, i.e. artificially generated, data that maximizes system performance. The goal is to increase the technical and economic added value of AI applications based on high data quality and quantity.

Our next Science Camp will take place from 31 October to 4 November. In the camp, a group of school students will learn some basic, fundamental concepts of robotics and computer science and put them in practice, by programming the NAO humanoid robot. The Camp is a cooperation between KCIST, the KIT research group High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H²T), the ZML and the Schülerakademie Karlsruhe.

Alina Roitberg, a PostDoc at the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics was awarded the Helmholtz Doctoral Prize for mission-oriented research in the field "Information" for her dissertation "Uncertainty-aware Models for Deep Learning-based Human Activity Recognition and Applications in Intelligent Vehicles". The Research Foundation rewards outstanding achievement and is intended to encourage future doctoral candidates to carry out mission oriented research and to position themselves at the interface between science and applications.

In its 2021 awarding round, the European Research Council (ERC) has decided to award an Advanced Grant to computer scientist Mehdi Tahoori, Professor for Dependable Nanocomputing at KIT. With his project PRICOM (stands for: Printed Computing) Professor Tahoori intends to enable dissemination of fast, inexpensive, and reliable (mini)computers on the consumer market and in personalized medicine. PRICOM focuses on the development of new computer architectures that are no longer based on conventional silicon chips, but on the principle of additive manufacture.

Pascal Friederich, Tenure-track Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Informatics (ITI) and head of the research group AiMat (Artificial Intelligence for Materials Sciences), is awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG). The prize in the amount of 20,000 € is the most important recognition of early-career researchers in Germany.

Pascal Friederich’s interdisciplinary work concentrates on the use of artificial intelligence for the simulation of materials, virtual materials design, and autonomous experimental platforms for automatic materials recognition.

The German-American start-up Daedalus is pursuing the major goal of building the world's first autonomous and reconfigurable factories and is currently building its first autonomous factory for precision parts in Karlsruhe. Three of the company's four founders studied at KIT. The AI start-up develops innovative software and robot solutions that allow companies to build autonomous factories in which precision parts are manufactured without human input. Daedalus' software-controlled factories will make high-precision manufacturing scalable in the future, bringing the benefits of automation to customers of all sizes, regardless of quantities.

Bringing autonomous driving safely to the masses: That is the goal of the start-up SafeAD, a spin-off from the FZI (Forschungszentrum Informatik), an innovation partner of KIT. The three founders, who all earned their doctorates at KIT, want to achieve this with a cardless approach. With the help of their technological knowledge from various fields such as machine learning, computer vision, computer graphics and sensor technology, autonomous driving without maps should reach the masses and change the mobility of the future in the long term.

On December 20, 2021, KCIST awarded the SICK Science Award in cooperation with the KIT Foundation. The prize is awarded for outstanding scientific achievements in the research fields of the KCIST.

This year's awards go to the dissertation of Dr. Andreas Kuhnle and the bachelor theses of Peter Koepernik
and Lukas Rapp.

In 2022, after the break due to corona , we will finally have BOGY internships at H²T again, for which we are very excited to announce the date:
From April 25 - 29, 2022 we offer internships (German: Berufs- und Studienorientierung an Gymnasien) for groups of school students in the field of robotics. They take place at KIT, Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics, High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H²T).

In this lecture series, in order to determine and denominate different places of agency of visualization, guest from different discourses of knowledge are called upon discussing the idea of visualization which impacts most the character of theories and practices of making visible in their discipline
The online lecture series is organized by the Institute of History of Art and Architecture - IKB, starts on Thursday, November 04, 2021 and will be held every 2 weeks from 18:00 - 19:30.

From November 2 - 5, 2021 our Science Camp Robotics will take place in person. In the camp, a group of school students will learn some basic, fundamental concepts of robotics and computer science and put them in practice, by programming the NAO humanoid robot. The Camp is a cooperation between KCIST, the KIT research group High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H²T), the ZML and the Schülerakademie Karlsruhe.

The KIT Science Week 2021 focuses on bringing the human back into the center of learning systems, by discussing the development of human-inspired, trustable, understandable, and adaptable AI technologies.

The scientific conference took place from 6 - 8 October 2021.

The US company Zoom Video Communications acquires kites GmbH, a KIT spin-off specializing in the development of real-time machine translation solutions. This was announced by Zoom on 29.06.2021. Zoom will also invest in further research at the Karlsruhe site.
KIT computer scientists are experts in real-time speech recognition and translation - the team of kites will help to improve Zoom's machine translation.

KIT Science Week celebrates its premiere. For one week, from October 5th to 10th 2021, researchers from all over the world will dive into the world of artificial intelligence, AI for short, together with participants from politics and industry as well as citizens from the city and the region. The new KIT event format offers diverse approaches to AI and opens up spaces for discourse. KIT wants to take new impulses from the Science Week for its own research agenda as well.

Virtualizing the design process of new materials offers great prospects to accelerate technological innovation. The process of virtual materials screening and design depends on the availability of fast and accurate modelling techniques that reliably predict materials properties at realistic operating conditions. Professor Pascal Friederich, head of the research group AiMat – Artificial Intelligence for Materials Sciences at the Institute of Theoretical Informatics together with colleagues from Göttingen and Toronto do joint research on fast simulation methods.

together.grow.shape – under this motto, key players from research, economy and society from all over Germany will meet on April 21, 2021 for the virtual results conference of the high-tech forum. The high-tech forum is the federal government's central innovation policy advisory body for the implementation of the high-tech strategy 2025.

The research on humanoid robotics and artificial intelligent of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H²T) group has also been selected for presentation in an online video. Don't miss it!

Computer scientist Dorothea Wagner, who researches and teaches at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), is the new chairwoman of the Science Council, the most important research policy advisory body in Germany. The professor and head of the KIT Institute for Theoretical Computer Science is the third woman in this position after her predecessor, the agricultural economist Martina Brockmeier, and the engineering scientist Dagmar Schipanski.

See the KIT Press release (German only)

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) honors the scientist for his research on integrated circuits at the nanoscale. Professor Mehdi Tahoori from the Institute of Computer Engineering (ITEC) of KIT was appointed Fellow by the International Engineering Association IEEE for his groundbreaking contributions in "contributions to resilient nanoscale integrated circuits" and thus awarded the highest membership status.

With its real-world lab "Robotic Artificial Intelligence", KIT will make artificial intelligence tangible through bidirectional exchange between society and research.

says Tamim Asfour about the project.

The Interactive Systems Lab (ISL) at KIT developed the first speech recognition system worldwide that works better than humans and is quicker than other AIs

Goal of the newly started Karlsruhe Competence Center for KI Engineering (CC-KING) is the design and development of methods and tools that make the behavior of systems predictable and their decisions comprehensible. CC-KING is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB with the participation of the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology.

On August 10, 2020 the Hessian Minister for Digital Strategy and Development Prof. Dr. Kristina Sinemus and Katrin Schütz, State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, Labour and Housing of the State of Baden-Württemberg, visited the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics. They gained insights into the current state of research in Artificial Intelligence using the examples of humanoid assistive and collaborative robotics, intuitive human-robot interaction, personalized hand prostheses and augmented exoskeletons.

Professor Peter Sanders (Institute of Theoretical Informatics) received together with Ulrich Meyer (University of Frankfurt) the ESA Test-of-Time Award 2019. ESA is the premier European conference on algorithms research. The ESA Test-of-Time Award recognizes excellent papers in algorithms research that were published in the ESA proceedings 19 to 21 years ago and are still influential and stimulating for the field today.

On Friday, 31 January 2020, the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) unanimously elected Professor Dorothea Wagner (Institute of Theoretical Informatics) as its new chairperson.

Further Information (German only)

Professor Thomas Zwick, Institute of Radio Frequency Engineering and Electronics (IHE), has become a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering.

Further information (German only)

Professor Rüdiger Dillmann was awarded "IROS Fellow" at the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019) in Macao.

A team of the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics at KIT received the NEO 2019 Innovation Prize for HoloMed, a system designed to support the surgeon in the operating room. Thanks to the deployment of AI methods and augmented reality, HoloMed significantly enhances the precision when performing brain punctures.

The NEO Innovation Prize is awarded yearly by the TechnologieRegion Karlsruhe.

KIT press release

The International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR) 2019 will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam. General Co-Chair is Professor Tamim Asfour (Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics at KIT). ISRR is one of the pioneering symposia in robotics worlwide and it promotes the development and dissemination of groundbreaking research and technological innovation in robotics with emphasis on its potential role to benefit humans.

Last Saturday the KIT Open House Day took place at Campus East. The KCIST was represented with its own tent and gave insights into current research areas regarding wearable robotics and informed about courses of studies in computer science. 

Read more

On 19 June 2019, KCIST awarded the SICK Science Award in cooperation with the KIT Foundation (German: KIT-Stiftung) in the framework of the "50 Years Informatics" ceremony.

Read more (German)

The AgiProbot project, founded by the Carls Zeiss Foundation, started on March 1, 2019. The goal of the project is the design of an agile production system that dynamically reacts to uncertain product specifications using artificial intelligence. The developed solutions will be tested in a demonstrator factory. The team, consisting of different KIT research groups, is coordinated by the KIT Institute of Production Science (wbk).

Project homepage (German only)

Under the motto "Together protecting the KIT IT Infrastructure ", the research group SECUSO (AIFB) together with SCC, KASTEL and ZML prepared new KIT specific, easy to understand information material on cyber security based on previous research results. The KIT Safer Internet Day 2019 team will present and distribute this material to the interested public on February 5, from 11 am to 3 pm, in the KIT cafeteria.

This year, the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR) will once again open its doors and give an insight into its current research within the framework of the European Robotics Week 2018. Both labs involved, the High Performance and Humanoid Technologies Lab (H²T) and the Intelligent Process Automation and Robotics Lab (IPR), will offer guided laboratory tours and some other specials.

Further Information (German only)

2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the Global Advanced Manufacturing Institute (GAMI), a platform established by Professor Gisela Lanza, wbk Institute of Production Science, to facilitate Sino-German research and innovation programs related to Smart Manufacturing. On the occasion of the celebration that takes place on November 8, 2018 in Suzhou, the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Factory  will be officially opened. The new research facility focuses on the deployment of Artificial Intelligence technologies and cooperative robotics in smart manufactoring environments.

ROBDEKON (German: "Robotersysteme für menschenfeindliche Umgebungen"), which started last June, deals with the deployment of robotics systems in contaminated area. The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and is endowed with twelve million euros for four years. 

The magazine "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" organizes a seminar on the topic artificial intelligence, with particular focus on humanoid robotics and deep learning in computer vision. The speakers are Professor Rainer Stiefelhagen (cv:hci) and Professor Tamim Asfour (H²T). A tour through the labs of the H²T-IAR research group will close the program. 

The new KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab will be established at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics - Intelligent Process Automation and Robotics Lab (IAR-IPR). The Lab, unique of its kind, will enable students worldwide to interact with real industrial robots through a remote interface and validate self-developed solutions directly on the robot.

KIT press release

Further information

Professor Thomas Zwick (IHE) has been elevated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2018, for his "contributions to millimeter wave transceivers". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

The taxonomy of whole-body support poses developed at the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H²T) at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR) has been presented in the article "A whole-body support pose taxonomy for multi-contact humanoid robot motions" published in Science Robotics (20 Dec. 2017).

KIT offers this year several opportunities to pupils, who would like to carry out their BOGY (German: Berufs- und Studienorientierung am Gymnasium in Baden-Württemberg) internship in the field of information technologies. Here some Links with further information:

Infomatics BOGY

Robotics BOGY at H2T

Robotics BOGY at MINT Kolleg

A colloquium in honor of Professor Heinz Wörn took place on October 20, 2017 in the Garden Hall of the Karlsruhe Palace, on the occasion of his retirement. High-ranking guests from academia and industry attended the colloquium, which offered a lively overview of Professor Wörn's successful career.

Further information (German only)

The KIT Open Day 2017 at Campus North, on June 24, was a great success. KCIST contributed to the event, by entertaining the visitors with a varied program, ranging from humanoid robots, mini radars and a system for the automatic translation of lectures at KIT.

Official KIT press release

Dr. Santiago Pagani from the Chair for Embedded Systems has been awarded the ACM “Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award” from SIGBED (Special Interest Group Embedded Systems of ACM) for his PhD thesis entitled “Power, Energy, and Thermal Management for Clustered Manycores".

The High Performance Humanoid Technologies (H²T) group released the KIT Motion-Language Dataset, an open large-scale dataset for linking human whole-body motion with natural language.

Link to the Paper 

Link to the Press Release of the Journal Publisher 

Professor Uwe D. Hanebeck (ISAS) has been elevated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2017, for his "contributions to nonlinear estimation and control". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

Professor Dennis Hofheinz develops new systems, by combining established cryptography methods with new elements under the project “PREP-CRYPTO: Preparing Cryptography for Modern Applications”. The European Research Council (ERC) will fund this project with about EUR 2 million in the next five years.

Thanks to his outstanding achievements in the field of theoretical computer science and cybersecurity, Professor Jörn Müller-Quade, Institute of Theoretical Informatics, has become a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering.

The German National Science Foundation (DFG) has granted a research training program „Energy Status Data – Informatics Methods for its Collection, Analysis, and Exploitation“ at KIT, which has started on May 1st, 2016. The inauguration colloquim will take place on November 7th, 2016 at 4 pm in the Tulla lecture hall of KIT.

The 5th International LSDMA Symposium on “The Challenge of Big Data in Science” will be held at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, on October 5th, 2016. The program includes presentations from several internationally renowned speakers.

The full program as well as registration and travel information and  can be found on the symposium homepage.
 

Starting from the winter semester 2016/2017 the KIT Department of Informatics will offer a new degree program as part of its teacher training program (German Lehramtstudium). The new course of studies aims at training qualified teaching staff for computer science education in schools.
An information event on April 22, 2016 will be held at the KIT Department of Informatics to present the new course of studies to teachers and all interested participants.  

The DGR Days 2016, an event of the German Robotics Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Robotik, DGR),  will be held on June 29-30 2016, in conjuction with RoboCup 2016, in Leipzig. The goal is to create a forum for academic exchange and foster a visible and interdisciplinary robotics community in Germany. A DGR Round Table will complement the program on June 30 - July 1, 2016.

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have set ambitious targets for increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emission and enlarging the share of renewable energy sources. Energy Informatics is developing the IT-based solutions required for achieving these targets. Fostering the transfer in this area between academia, industry and service providers was a major goal of the 4th D-A-CH Energieinformatik Conference, chaired by Professor Hartmut Schmeck (AIFB) and held in Karlsruhe on November 12-13, 2015.

Flexibility is a major requirements for future energy provisioning systems that will have to cope with both fluctuating demands and dithering supply.  Experts from academia, in particular from KIT-AIFB and FZI, and industry discussed recent developments in the area at the 31th AIK-Symposium "Smart Energy" on October 23rd, 2015.

Media art is often so space consuming that it can hardly be exhibited permanently. The cooperation between ISAS and ZAK „e-Installation – Virtual experience-room for media art" (German: "Virtueller Erlebnisraum für Medienkunst") aims at preserving works of media art for future generations by means of telepresence.

The project was awarded on September 23, 2015 as "Distiguished location 2015" by the initiave "Germany - Land of ideas" .

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) approved the proposal “Continuous Learning in International Collaborative Studies” (CLICS), which provides the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT) with a four years support. CLICS will develop three international Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in the areas of automatic speech recognition, machine translation and robotics.  To facilitate international access to the MOOCs automatic transcription and translation technology will be used.

On January 28-29, 2015 the FZI Research Center for Information Technology celebrated its 30th anniversary by organizing the congress “30 Years of Knowledge Transfer” with presentations on key topics like security, mobility, health care, industry 4.0, logistics, robotics, and energy. An Open House event rounded the program.

Prof. Alexander Waibel  (Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics) has been elevated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2015, for his "contributions to neural network based speech recognition and translation and multimodal interfaces". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

Prof. Alexander Waibel  (Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics) has been elevated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2015, for his "contributions to neural network based speech recognition and translation and multimodal interfaces". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

A joint cooperation between KASTEL and the Wibu-Systems AG was awarded on October 23, 2014, with the first prize of the 5th German IT Security Prize of the Horst Görtz Foundation for their Blurry Box® method for software protection.

KIT press release

Professor Joachim Milberg, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BMW AG, visited on October 22, 2014, the Institut for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR).

Since July 1, 2014 Prof. Puente serves together with Prof. Zagar (Uni Linz) as Editor-in-Chief of the renowned journal  Technisches Messen  (TM - Technical Measurement), a professional journal addressing the entire spectrum of  application-based industrial measurement technology.