On 21 February 2025, the second industry symposium of the Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI) at the University of Oldenburg and of the DFKI research department Interactive Machine Learning (IML) took place at EWE Forum / Alte Fleiwa. More than thirty-five industry leaders and representatives from the regional economy followed the invitation of Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung Oldenburg – DER KLEINE KREIS e.V., including many sponsors of the endowed professorship AAI.
The endowed professorship is sponsored by CEWE, EWE AG, BÜFA, the OLB foundation, Dr. Caroline Neumüller, Alexander Neumüller, the economic association DER KLEINE KREIS e.V. and the Foundation of the Metal Industry in the North West.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Sonntag and Dirk Heitkötter, managing director of Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung Oldenburg – DER KLEINE KREIS e.V.
The event was opened with a welcoming address by Dirk Heitkötter, managing director of Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung Oldenburg – DER KLEINE KREIS e.V. and Dr. Christian Friege, member of the management board of EWE AG, emphasising the importance of the endowed professorship and its benefits for the regional economy.
In his keynote, Professor Sonntag emphasised that an important goal of AAI/IML research is to develop application solutions for SMEs. He presented the highlights of the professorship and the work of PhD students who are currently being supervised by him. He spoke about the potential of IML’s and AAI’s research abilities and the state-of-the-art machine learning infrastructure of the IML laboratory (iml.dfki.de)
After that Aliki Anagnostopoulou spoke about „Interactive Image Captioning“, Sara-Jane Bittner gave insights into the photobook creation tool FaceGym, and the eye tracking functionality with Pupil Labs Neon; László Kopácsi presented his doctoral studies in the field of „Multimodal Interaction“ and the „MASTER“ project.
In his presentation about „Biodiversity conservation with AI“ Thiago Gouvêa informed about the project „Coral growth assessment“ and looked back on the successful participation in the XPRIZE Rainforest competition. Based on this, Hannes Kath explained how vocalisation in the acoustic wildlife monitoring application can be identified; and Rida Saghir concluded by explaining how ecological data can be used for biodiversity assessment. Siting Liang gave insights into the topic „Multimodal fact-checking to detect misinformation on the Internet“ and Tuan Tran introduced his project „Advancing 3D Vision for Medical AI“ in which he closely works with Evangelisches Krankenhaus Oldenburg.
Thiago Gouvêa, Sara-Jane Bittner and Aliki Anagnostopoulou
Professor Sonntag closed the event with an example of DFKI transfer labs and the opportunities for cooperation between companies and the endowed professorship as well as DFKI.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Sonntag presenting DFKI transfer labs
