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More AI for Berlin
BIFOLD celebrates permanent federal-state funding with an international symposium and a ceremony.
A Poetic Dialogue of Art & Science
The Italian media artist Marco Barotti is BIFOLD artist in residence 2022. The goal of the residence program titled “Art of Entanglement” is to combine artistic and scientific perspectives on artificial intelligence. Marco Barotti will receive a total of 30,000 euros to create an artistic project of his choice, shaped by his regular interaction with BIFOLD researchers. “I am very excited about the opportunity to pursue a new dimension in my art working together with researchers at BIFOLD”, so Marco Barotti.
ACM SIGMOD 2022 Reproducibility Badge
The paper “ExDRa: Exploratory Data Science on Federated Raw Data” from a group of scientists, among them many Bifold scientists, has been successfully reproduced, and was awarded the “Results Reproduced” badge by ACM. This badge is applied to papers in which the main results of the paper have been successfully obtained by a person or team other than the author.
Web Trackers are widely present in Governmental Websites
BIFOLD Researcher Prof. Dr. Georgios Smaragdakis with TU Berlin recent bachelor graduate Matthias Götze, and collaborators from IMDEA Software and Networks Institutes, and the Cyprus University of Technology performed a large-scale measurement study of more than 5,500 official government websites. The study shows that up to 90% of these official websites in some countries add third-party tracker cookies without user consent.
“We would have expected that governmental websites visited by millions of citizens every day comply with GDPR law and be held to the highest standards regarding respecting user privacy. Unfortunately, our study shows that this is not the case”, says BIFOLD Fellow Georgios Smaragdakis.
Multi-Million funding for AI research “Made In Berlin”
Berlin’s AI competence center the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) at Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) has now made the transition from project funding to permanent joint funding provided by the federal government and the State of Berlin. This sees the establishment of a national AI competence center in Berlin that will make an important contribution to the development and applications of artificial intelligence. Through a partnership with Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, BIFOLD is set to become a cross-university central institute in the near future.
Facing an inconvenient truth
Jean-Pierre Seifert is professor of security in telecommunications at TU Berlin as well as a researcher at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data. His research focuses on topics such as hardware security, cryptography technology, and quantum computers. He is also an established specialist for computer and communication security. Along with other experts he has been warning for some time now of the dangers of cyberattacks for private businesses and critical state infrastructures. Even before the start of the war in Ukraine his research demonstrated that almost all hardware solutions used in the commercial sector and even those intended to protect state high security areas do not function adequately.
The shared scientific identity of Europe
The project Sphere: Knowledge System Evolution and the Shared Scientific Identity of Europe is one of the leading Digital Humanities projects, exploring a large corpus of more than 350 book editions about geocentric cosmology and astronomy from the early days of printing between the 15th and the 17th centuries (Sphaera Corpus) for about 76.000 pages of material. The relatively large size of this humanities dataset presents a challenge to traditional historical approaches, but provides a great opportunity to computationally explore such a large collection of books. In this regard, the Sphere project is an incubator of multiple Digital Humanities (DH) approaches aimed at answering various questions about the corpus, with the ultimate objective to understand the evolution and transmission of knowledge in the early modern period.
Flexible adjustment of computing workloads could improve carbon footprint of data centers
To reduce their carbon footprint, more and more computing systems are connected to microgrids to gain direct access to renewable energy sources. However, the local availability of solar and wind energy is highly variable and requires consumers to timely adapt their consumption to the current supply. Researchers from the Berlin Institute for the Foundation of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) have developed a new admission control approach that accepts flexible workloads such as machine learning training jobs only if they can be computed relying solely on renewable excess energy.
Two demo papers accepted at VLDB 2022
Two demonstration papers of BIFOLD researchers have been accepted at the 48th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB). The VLDB 2022 will take place in Sydney, Australia (and hybrid) in September 05-09, 2022.
Wojciech Samek and Klaus-Robert Mueller Published new book on XAI
To tap the full potential of artificial intelligence, not only do we need to understand the decisions it makes, these insights must also be made applicable. This is the aim of the new book “xxAI – Beyond Explainable AI”, edited by Wojciech Samek, head of the Artificial Intelligence department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) and BIFOLD researcher and Klaus-Robert Mueller, professor of machine learning at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) and co-director at BIFOLD.