Meeting brings together stakeholders from Saxony, Poland, and the Czech Republic
It has come to stay: As a key technology, artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly influence many areas of society. With its AI strategy, the Free State aims to improve the framework conditions for its use in Saxony. Regular networking meetings of the central protagonists are an integral part of this effort. Following the first exchange of experiences at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) at the end of November 2022, around 80 experts met again at the Kulturforum Görlitzer Synagoge on April 28, 2023. The event, which was organized by the HZDR’s AI Institute – the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) – focused on cooperation in the border triangle of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
Expanding on the results of the previous meeting, which specifically addressed the topic of knowledge and technology transfer, the participants from science, politics, business, and society developed concrete recommendations for action in the fields of “Promotion of cutting-edge research”, “Optimized data collection and use”, “Recruitment of top personnel and promotion of local talent”, and “Reinforcement of knowledge transfer”. The findings of the four working groups will be summarized in the coming weeks and submitted to the Saxon State Chancellery.
The state government regards the increasing digitization across all areas of life to offer enormous potential for the Free State, as Saxony’s State Minister Oliver Schenk, emphasized at the meeting during a panel discussion with the Scientific Director of the HZDR, Prof. Sebastian M. Schmidt: “Artificial intelligence will be the central driving force for the economy and innovation in the years to come. It will fundamentally change social, economic, and ecological processes. With our AI strategy, we are paving the way to develop Saxony into a leading German research and innovation hub for AI.
Networking with neighboring countries plays a decisive role in this context, estimates Prof. Schmidt: “With our German-Polish institute CASUS, which consolidates the AI expertise of the HZDR, the TU Dresden, the University of Wrocław, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), we have established a strong transnational partner for the digitization of science. Together, we now have the opportunity to transform our region into a key player for artificial intelligence in Europe.”
This assessment is shared by experts from Poland and the Czech Republic. For the first time, scientists from neighboring countries participated in the AI networking meeting, which was appropriately themed “Building Bridges, Breaking Borders”, and presented their approaches to AI research and application.
About the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding
CASUS was founded 2019 in Görlitz/Germany and pursues data-intensive interdisciplinary systems research in such diverse disciplines as earth systems research, systems biology or materials research. The goal of CASUS is to create digital images of complex systems of unprecedented fidelity to reality with innovative methods from mathematics, theoretical systems research, simulations as well as data and computer science to give answers to urgent societal questions. The founding partners of CASUS are the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig (UFZ), the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden (MPI-CBG), the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) and the University of Wrocław (UWr). CASUS, managed as an institute of the HZDR, is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Saxon State Ministry for Science, Culture and Tourism (SMWK).