Current Projects
| Directors | Prof. Mira Mezini, Prof. Kristian Kersting, Prof. Jan Peters, Prof. Stefan Roth |
| Duration | 4/2021 – 12/2025 |
| Website | https://hessian.ai/projects/3ai-the-third-wave-of-ai/ |
| Short description |
Researchers led by TU Darmstadt want to usher in a new era in the development of artificial intelligence (AI): Their AI systems are to acquire human-like communication and thinking skills, recognize and classify new situations and adapt to them independently. “Third Wave of AI” is funded with 5.2 million euros as part of the “Cluster Projects” funding line of the state of Hesse preparing for the next round of the Bund-Länder Excellence Strategy until 2025. It combines AI research from TU Darmstadt and Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg and is closely linked to the Hessian Centre for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.AI). The project is applying for funding as a cluster of excellence under the name “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI) as part of the excellence strategy of the German federal and state governments. |
| Directors | Prof. Carsten Binnig, Prof. Kristian Kersting, Prof. Jan Peters |
| Duration | 3/2022 – 2/2025 |
| Website | http://dfki.de/ |
| Short description |
Since March 2022, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has been strengthening basic AI research with the DFKI Laboratory Darmstadt. The three new research areas combine systemic AI approaches to create new impulses for business and society. With the Darmstadt Lab, DFKI is establishing three new research areas, all of which deal with the learning component of AI:
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| Directors | Prof. Kristian Kersting, Prof. Mira Mezini |
| Duration | 9/2020 – 12/2024 |
| Website | http://hessian.ai |
| Short description | hessian.AI aims to further advance cutting-edge research shaping the third wave of AI, focuses on specific practical applications to seek answers to the important challenges of our time and transfers knowledge to business and society. The state of Hesse is funding the establishment and operation of the cross-university Hessian AI Centre with its headquarters at TU Darmstadt. |
| Directors | Prof. Stefan Roth |
| Duration | 10/2022 – 9/2027 |
| Website | https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/eliza |
| Short description | The Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELIZA) is a graduate school in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). ELIZA’s research and training activities focus on four main topics: the basics of machine learning (ML) — including ML-driven fields like computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), or robot learning —, machine learning systems, applications in autonomous systems, as well as trans-disciplinary applications for machine learning in other scientific fields, from life sciences to physics. |
Current Project Participation
| Directors | Prof. Michael Waidner |
| Duration | since 2019 |
| Website | www.athene-center.de |
| Short description | In the National Research Centre for Applied Cybersecurity, ATHENE (formerly CRISP), the TU Darmstadt with its profile topic Cybersecurity and Privacy, the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt as well as the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT and the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD have joined forces to form Europe's largest alliance of research institutions in the field of cybersecurity. The approximately 450 scientists work on core issues of cybersecurity in society, business, and administration. They regularly advise business and public administration, provide assistance for new entrepreneurs and prepare expert reports for politics and business. ATHENE is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the state of Hesse. |
| Directors | Prof. Constantin A. Rothkopf (Darmstadt), Prof. Roland W. Fleming (Gießen), Prof. Frank Bremmer (Marburg) |
| Duration | 4/2021 – 12/2025 |
| Website | https://www.theadaptivemind.de/ |
| Short description | The Adaptive Mind is a research cluster that brings together scientists from Experimental Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Artificial Intelligence in order to understand how the human mind successfully adapts to changing conditions, and what happens when these adaptive processes fail. |
| Directors | Prof. André Seyfarth |
| Duration | 1/2022 – 6/2026 |
| Website | https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/lokoassist/ |
| Short description |
Leg prostheses, orthoses and exoskeletons become active movement assistance systems by individually and situation-specifically detecting their users’ movements and providing them with appropriate force/torque support. The research in our RTG LokoAssist funded by the German Science Foundation DFG aims at a “seamless” integration of assistive devices into the human body schema. This requires an automatic recognition of different movement intentions to create and intuitive and predictable motor behavior. Such assistance systems promise a significantly expanded range of motion with lower metabolic energy expenditure, better individual adaptability, and greater ease of movement. While this potential has so far not been fully tapped, the RTG addresses it with a highly interdisciplinary approach: the creation of innovative technologies, which continuously and actively involve potential users into the research and developmental process to achieve high quality interaction and a high level of user acceptance. |
| Directors | Prof. Andreas Dreizler (ad interim) |
| Duration | 10/2020 – 9/2025 |
| Website | https://kompaki.de/ |
| Short description |
In the Competence Centre for Work and Artificial Intelligence (AI), partners from science and business come together to research and directly implement questions on AI in the world of work. The goal of KompAKI is application-oriented research on the use of AI in the world of work and where the potential for this lies, how such AI-based systems should be designed and how this changes the world of work. In doing so, we would like to transfer the entire knowledge into entrepreneurial practice and the world of work. The project is funded by the BMBF for five years and consists of eleven research partners, including the TU Darmstadt and the University of Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, eight companies, the Chamber of Commerce and associated partners. |
| Directors | Prof. Kristian Kersting, Prof. Constantin A. Rothkopf |
| Duration | 1/2021 – 12/2025 |
| Website | https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/whitebox |
| Short description | The LOEWE Research Cluster WhiteBox is aimed at developing methods at the intersection between Cognitive Science and AI to make human and artificial intelligence more understandable. |
| Directors | Prof. Winfried Rief (Philipps-Universität Marburg) |
| Duration | 1/2024 – 12/2027 |
| Website | https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/whitebox |
| Short description |
Mental health problems are among the most common and most serious illnesses, affecting one in four people across all sections of the population. The earlier, better and more precise the treatment, the greater the treatment success. Together, scientists from four Hessian universities want to use a novel approach to develop better therapeutic treatments. The core idea of DYNAMIC is not only to look at individual characteristics such as anxiety, negative mood or individual activation processes in the brain, but also to focus on their interconnectedness and the dynamic changes in these networks and analyse them with the help of AI. Dynamic network models can revolutionise the understanding of mental illnesses and their treatment because they offer a better understanding of the interdependencies of individual symptoms and syndromes and the dynamics of their changes in mental disorders. The LOEWE centre DYNAMIC (Dynamic Network Approach of Mental Health to Stimulate Innovations for Change), funded by the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts (HMWK), is led by the Philipps University of Marburg. The TU researchers involved in the application are Professor Iryna Gurevych and Professor Kristian Kersting. |
| Directors | Prof. Petra Gehring |
| Duration | since 11/2019 |
| Website | https://zevedi.de/ |
| Short description | The Centre Responsible Digitality (ZEVEDI) is a research network which actively reaches out into politics, society and the economy. It combines the scientific expertise of researchers based at Hessian universities in order to analyse the ethical and legal dimensions of digital transformation, thus contributing to shaping this transformation. ZEVEDI identifies and discusses responsibility as a crucial yet uncertain aspect of technological development and aims at making responsible digitality conceivable as well as practically feasible. ZEVEDI engages in research projects, promotes the transfer of scientific knowledge into society and the economy and provides research-based policy advice on the topic – for a digital transformation guided by a democratic and humane orientation. |
PlexPlain – Explaining Linear Programs (project participation)
| Directors | Prof. Frank Jäkel, Prof. Florian Steinke |
| Duration | 4/2020 – 3/2023 |
| Website | https://www.softwaresysteme.pt-dlr.de/de/ki-erkl-rbarkeit-und-transparenz.php |
| Short description | In “PlexPlain”, fundamental behavioural studies are being conducted to investigate how people understand linear programmes. Furthermore, new methods are being developed that (semi-)automatically simplify linear programmes, translate them into graphical models and generate explanations. In the behavioural studies, test subjects are confronted with planning problems that can be optimally solved by linear programmes. The observed solution strategies and accompanying explanations flow into the development of the new methods, which in turn provide hypotheses to be tested for more comprehensible explanations. In particular, graphical models are extracted from complex systems and used to represent comprehensible, qualitative cause-effect relationships. |
