The half-day symposium was organized by the Economic Association Oldenburg – DER KLEINE KREIS e.V., one of the supporters of the endowed professorship of Prof. Daniel Sonntag. Other supporters include the CEWE Stiftung & Co. KGaA, EWE AG, BÜFA, the OLB Foundation, Dr. Caroline Neumüller, Alexander Neumüller, and the Foundation of the Metal Industry in the Northwest.
The event was opened with welcoming remarks by Dirk Heitkötter, Managing Director of the Economic Association Oldenburg, and Dr. Christian Friege, Board Member of EWE AG. Both emphasized the importance of the endowed professorship and its benefits for the regional economy.
AI Solutions for SMEs
In his keynote, Prof. Sonntag highlighted that a central goal of AAI/IML research is the development of application solutions for SMEs. He presented the highlights of the professorship and the work of his doctoral students, particularly the research competencies of IML and AAI as well as the state-of-the-art infrastructure of the IML laboratory.
DFKI – Interactive Machine Learning Lab
Research Projects in the IML Research Area
DFKI scientist Aliki Anagnostopoulou spoke about interactive image captioning, a form of automatic image description based on large language models. Sara-Jane Bittner provided insights into an AI-supported tool for creating photo books and explained emotion recognition (FaceGym) using algorithms and machine learning. She also presented the eye-tracking functionality with the Pupil Lab Neon Eye-Tracking System.
László Kopácsi presented his doctoral thesis on multimodal interaction and the EU-funded project "MASTER," which promotes the XR ecosystem for teaching and training in robotics. The goal is to provide an open XR platform for safe robot environments.
Prof. Dr. Thiago Gouvêa, Senior Researcher at DFKI, spoke about "Protecting Biodiversity with AI" and the "Coral Growth Assessment" project. He reported on the successful participation in the XPRIZE Rainforest competition, where his team achieved 3rd place. The developed AI system filters acoustic signals from audio files of the Brazilian rainforest to determine biodiversity.
Hannes Kath, research associate at the University of Oldenburg, explained the identification of vocalizations in the acoustic monitoring of wildlife. Rida Saghir, research associate of the AAI working group, explained the use of ecological data to assess biodiversity.
Siting Liang from DFKI presented "Multimodal Fact-Checking to Detect Misinformation on the Internet," and Tuan Tran (DFKI) presented the project "Advancing 3D Vision for Medical AI," which is conducted in collaboration with the Evangelical Hospital Oldenburg.
Collaboration between Companies, Endowed Professorship, and DFKI
After the presentations and project introductions, Prof. Sonntag concluded the event with an example from the DFKI Transfer Labs and explained opportunities for collaboration between companies, the endowed professorship, and DFKI.