Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ELISE (European Learning and Intelligent Systems Excellence)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2024-08-31
To bring and keep Europe at the forefront of the AI and machine learning revolution, the ELISE consortium works in close collaboration with the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) to make it possible for the best basic research to be performed in Europe and create impact and jobs. A growing network of 70 partners including 23 organizing nodes implements activities to attract and enable top-level researchers, create regional ecosystems around leading AI research, and bring Europe's leading AI lighthouses together, leveraging excellence and diversity to make Europe a natural choice for world’s best researchers in the field.
To achieve this, ELISE selected the following actions:
- Establish a network of excellent researchers and laboratories that act as local anchors across Europe and represent the community, provide experts within society, and coordinate a joint effort across the continent.
- Build an attractive training network for junior scientists that keeps them in Europe, by offering the highest quality training for Academic Excellence in Machine Learning.
- Make the industry involved with elite academic research so that participating companies’ competencies will rival those of large industry laboratories
- Establish a sustainable ecosystem of machine learning stakeholders covering the value network to facilitate and accelerate a broad integration of machine learning technologies.
Conclusions:
ELISE has ensured the sustainability of the network by helping the ELLIS Society to establish a new organizational structure, called ELLIS Areas. ELLIS Areas has been established as a permanent organisation, with committees in charge of ELLIS’s AI/ML Research Programs; PhD. program; membership; fundraising; and collaboration with other NoEs and entities (e.g. Adra-e).
ELISE helped the ELLIS network to grow to 41 units (up from 34 in 2022), 1 associated unit, and 16 Research Programs (up from 11 in 2020).
ELISE has established the unique and highly successful ELLIS PhD. Programme, which will carry on now that ELISE has concluded.
ELISE has built a large stakeholder network of researchers, policy makers and industry.
ELISE has supported 32 SMEs, which have produced innovate results that have the potential to benefit wider society.
To achieve this, ELISE selected the following actions:
- Establish a network of excellent researchers and laboratories that act as local anchors across Europe and represent the community, provide experts within society, and coordinate a joint effort across the continent.
- Build an attractive training network for junior scientists that keeps them in Europe, by offering the highest quality training for Academic Excellence in Machine Learning.
- Make the industry involved with elite academic research so that participating companies’ competencies will rival those of large industry laboratories
- Establish a sustainable ecosystem of machine learning stakeholders covering the value network to facilitate and accelerate a broad integration of machine learning technologies.
Conclusions:
ELISE has ensured the sustainability of the network by helping the ELLIS Society to establish a new organizational structure, called ELLIS Areas. ELLIS Areas has been established as a permanent organisation, with committees in charge of ELLIS’s AI/ML Research Programs; PhD. program; membership; fundraising; and collaboration with other NoEs and entities (e.g. Adra-e).
ELISE helped the ELLIS network to grow to 41 units (up from 34 in 2022), 1 associated unit, and 16 Research Programs (up from 11 in 2020).
ELISE has established the unique and highly successful ELLIS PhD. Programme, which will carry on now that ELISE has concluded.
ELISE has built a large stakeholder network of researchers, policy makers and industry.
ELISE has supported 32 SMEs, which have produced innovate results that have the potential to benefit wider society.
ELISE has produced a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), outlining the consortium’s vision for the next generation of AI for Europe. The SRA set out ELISE’s roadmap for creating trustworthy AI technologies that can boost economic growth while effectively serving the diverse European society. The document also outlines how technological advances can contribute to European policy ambitions for AI, as well as the support needed to maintain European leadership in AI. The SRA is available on the AIonDemand website. We support the work of fourteen Research programs that serve to connect the research of ELISE scientists to wider scientific and social issues through the intersection with five key research themes set out in the SRA.
To ensure ELISE members have access to computational resources and infrastructure necessary to be internationally competitive, we developed and installed a concept of a storage cluster. It is hosted by JKU Linz and has a dedicated showcase GPU cluster set-up linked to it. Benchmark datasets have been made available and best-practice ready-to-use ML models are provided on the storage cluster.
ELISE has established active collaboration with the industry, building on collaborations among ELLIS/ELISE scientists and the industry. ELLIS PhD program offers industry-track specialization for young researchers and has industry representatives actively involved in its activities. ELISE partners have created the first commercial Certificate for AI systems (supervised ML) which is now on the market. The certificate is accompanied by a white paper on “Trusted Artificial Intelligence: Towards Certification of Machine Learning Applications”.
Conclusions:
The project has recruited 434 PhDs and postdocs from over 8,000 applicants, which is more than double the target KPI of 200 set in the ELISE proposal. 296 senior scientists from 132 different institutions and companies across 17 countries in Europe serve as main or secondary advisors of one or more candidates in the program.
ELISE has engaged industry by supporting 32 SME projects. Also, the project has established a list of industry contact points consisting of more than 80 companies that have collaborated with the ELLIS PhD and Postdoc Program, whether it is a one-off collaboration through program events or sponsorships like the ELLIS Doctoral Symposium, or a longer-term through the Industry Track partnerships.
In building a stakeholder community, ELISE’s Innovation Manager was appointed to the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence to advance recommendations for the international governance of AI; ELISE representatives contributed to the definition of a roadmap for Europe on AI foundation models; and, ELISE has produced two versions of its Strategic Research Agenda and distributed the agenda over relevant policy and decision makers in the EC and industry, as well as to fellow networks under the ICT-48 call.
ELISE also prepared and published a joint European SRA in collaboration with other European AI Networks of Excellence. Representatives of ELISE joined the Commission and other AI NoEs in Brussels to formally launch the European SRA and to discuss how to ensure European leadership in AI research on 4 July 2023. This joint SRA was used as input in the creation of the updated SRIDA of the ADRA PPP.
ELISE has produced a comprehensive report on Europe’s compute infrastructure needs.
To ensure ELISE members have access to computational resources and infrastructure necessary to be internationally competitive, we developed and installed a concept of a storage cluster. It is hosted by JKU Linz and has a dedicated showcase GPU cluster set-up linked to it. Benchmark datasets have been made available and best-practice ready-to-use ML models are provided on the storage cluster.
ELISE has established active collaboration with the industry, building on collaborations among ELLIS/ELISE scientists and the industry. ELLIS PhD program offers industry-track specialization for young researchers and has industry representatives actively involved in its activities. ELISE partners have created the first commercial Certificate for AI systems (supervised ML) which is now on the market. The certificate is accompanied by a white paper on “Trusted Artificial Intelligence: Towards Certification of Machine Learning Applications”.
Conclusions:
The project has recruited 434 PhDs and postdocs from over 8,000 applicants, which is more than double the target KPI of 200 set in the ELISE proposal. 296 senior scientists from 132 different institutions and companies across 17 countries in Europe serve as main or secondary advisors of one or more candidates in the program.
ELISE has engaged industry by supporting 32 SME projects. Also, the project has established a list of industry contact points consisting of more than 80 companies that have collaborated with the ELLIS PhD and Postdoc Program, whether it is a one-off collaboration through program events or sponsorships like the ELLIS Doctoral Symposium, or a longer-term through the Industry Track partnerships.
In building a stakeholder community, ELISE’s Innovation Manager was appointed to the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence to advance recommendations for the international governance of AI; ELISE representatives contributed to the definition of a roadmap for Europe on AI foundation models; and, ELISE has produced two versions of its Strategic Research Agenda and distributed the agenda over relevant policy and decision makers in the EC and industry, as well as to fellow networks under the ICT-48 call.
ELISE also prepared and published a joint European SRA in collaboration with other European AI Networks of Excellence. Representatives of ELISE joined the Commission and other AI NoEs in Brussels to formally launch the European SRA and to discuss how to ensure European leadership in AI research on 4 July 2023. This joint SRA was used as input in the creation of the updated SRIDA of the ADRA PPP.
ELISE has produced a comprehensive report on Europe’s compute infrastructure needs.
Europe called the AI and machine learning community to develop AI that “contributes to Europe’s sustainability, growth and competitiveness, and inclusion, leading to individual and societal wellbeing” (AI HLEG, 2019, pg. 21). ELISE contributes to developing technologies needed to solve global challenges while serving European society, ensuring Europe plays a major role in the scientific and societal revolution that is underway. The alumni of the ELLIS PhD programme will form the next generation of leading AI researchers in Europe and well-trained AI professionals in European SMEs and large companies. They will be at the forefront of creating new spin-offs and start-ups with a significant impact on the economy and society in Europe, developing trustworthy AI solutions. In addition, ELISE activities aim to enrich the education offered for non-AI professionals and equip them with the necessary AI skills, as well as to make the best of this technology by educating the general public. ELISE recognises that we need trusted AI that corresponds to European ethical values, and citizens’ aspirations. This is why ELISE directly studies ethical, trustworthy and robust AI, as both research topics of individual programmes and key common themes of the research programmes.
References: Policy and Investment Recommendations for Trustworthy AI by High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG), 2019, available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/policy-and-investment-recommendations-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence(opens in new window)
References: Policy and Investment Recommendations for Trustworthy AI by High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG), 2019, available at: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/policy-and-investment-recommendations-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence(opens in new window)