Professor Georgia Chalvatzaki has been selected by the ERC for her project “SIREN” . This investigates innovative AI robot software architectures that enable human-like robots to perform challenging tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments. Professor Justus Thies is being funded for his project “Learning Digital Humans in Motion” . His aim is to develop AI-based image processing and graphic tools to create lifelike digital representations of people for the immersive digital world. Both projects will receive a total of around 1.5 million euros each over a period of five years.

The European Union uses the Starting Grant to promote outstanding research and, at the same time, early career researchers. The Starting Grant is aimed at researchers who can already demonstrate excellent work and now want to expand their own research or set up their own research group at the start of their careers.

Both Chalvatzaki and Thies are also conducting research in the TU project “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence (RAI)”, which has submitted a full application for the Cluster of Excellence funding line as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. TU Darmstadt is represented in the Excellence Strategy competition with a total of three project outlines. In addition to “RAI”, these are “The Adaptive Mind” (TAM) from the field of cognitive sciences and “CoM2Life” on communicating biomaterials.

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