Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ELISE (European Learning and Intelligent Systems Excellence)
Período documentado: 2022-03-01 hasta 2023-08-31
To achieve this, ELISE aims to:
- 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.
The growth of the ELISE network is ensured through an excellence-driven program for onboarding senior researchers as well as the implementation of the ELLIS PhD Program to recruit top junior scientists to Europe. Since the start of ELISE, 145 new Fellows have joined the network, following a rigorous selection process. Two ELLIS PhD program calls took place, attracting over 1300 and 1700 applications respectively, with a selection rate below 5% in the first call. The selection process in the second call will be finalized in late spring 2022. To boost collaboration and innovation across the network, ELISE implements mobility programs in the form of travel grants for experienced scientists, PhD and postdoc students.
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. As part of the guidelines on the joint use of resources, interviews with HPCs teams and practitioners showed challenges across the machine learning community in utilizing HPCs. In the next months, ELISE will offer workshops and tutorials to address the obstacles. Produced materials will be open-sourced.
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”. Use cases are being implemented, with an aim to support benchmarking and certification of AI algorithms relevant to the EU industry. The first ELISE Open call offering funding to SMEs and start-ups developing novel AI solutions and applications was implemented in the fall of 2021. We received close to 400 applications, and 16 projects were selected for funding. The selected projects underwent a mandatory ethics self-assessment and received coaching services from ethics experts. The ELISE Industry Advisory Board was set up in September 2020. The Board contributes to the project activities and provides valuable input.
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