Transatlantic Exchange

Beyond Generative AI: Innovative Germany Seminar

This seminar was an opportunity for Bay Area researchers and innovators to connect with representatives from Germany’s innovation and excellence clusters. Profs. Sören Auer and Mira Mezini, representing German universities of excellence, highlighted potential partnerships and research collaborations with Germany in artificial intelligence.

The slides for this event can be accessed here. The recording can be accessed here.

Key Program Elements

  • Introduction to Germany as an Innovation Location – Gain insights into Germany’s approach to fostering research and innovation across various sectors.
  • Networking Session—This was an interactive opportunity to meet alums, researchers, and leaders from critical German innovation and excellence clusters, particularly in AI.

Featured Experts and Research Topics

Prof. Dr. Sören Auer is the Director of the TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology as well as Head of the Data Science and Digital Libraries research group and board member at L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover.  Prof. Auer's work centers on semantic technologies, knowledge engineering, and big data analytics. He has been instrumental in developing projects such as DBpedia (the semantification of Wikipedia) and the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). His research drives advances in neuro-symbolic AI-powered knowledge systems, which are critical for innovation in industries like digital libraries and data infrastructure. Prof. Auer is closely associated with the German Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which are critical initiatives for open data and AI-driven research collaboration. 
Sören Auer
Prof. Dr. Ing. Mira Mezini is a professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt. She is founding co-director of hessian.AI, one of Germany’s most prominent AI clusters, and representative of TU Darmstadt in the board of National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE).   She is an expert in software methods, specifically in programming and software analysis methods for and with AI systems, software security, and distributed resilient software. Her work at the intersection of AI and software methods addresses topics in both directions: Programming methods for AI systems and AI methods for automated software engineering. She is member of the senate of the German Research Foundation (DFG) – the most important founding body of basic research in Germany -- and also closely associated with the European Research Council – the most prestigious European basic research funding agency. 
Mira Mezini