WestAI is one of four service centers across Germany that has started work to make it easier for companies and research institutions to access AI applications and support them in their implementation. To this end, methods are being developed to train comprehensive AI models and transfer them efficiently to a variety of everyday applications. The project, in which Paderborn University is involved, is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for a period of four years.
How can companies and institutions be made fit for the use of artificial intelligence? How can large AI systems be created and applied to a variety of everyday usage scenarios in society? Will artificial intelligence soon enable huge data archives to be recorded and searched in detail in seconds? With WestAI, NRW now has a regional service center that is driving forward AI research in Germany and promoting the transfer of scientific findings into practice.
The new service center will ensure that research institutions and companies have easier access to powerful AI systems and computing power in the future. The aim is to play a leading role in AI research and its application, not only to strengthen Germany's technological sovereignty, but also to promote the transfer of AI to a wider audience through low-threshold services.
In addition to Paderborn University, the consortium includes the University of Bonn, RWTH Aachen University, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and TU Dortmund University.
"Paderborn University is contributing its many years of experience in the development of machine learning methods for spoken language and audio signals. One focus will be on learning suitable representations for any acoustic signals that are obtained from very large data sets in an unsupervised manner - i.e. without the need for human annotation of the data," explains Prof. Dr. Reinhold Häb-Umbach from the Heinz Nixdorf Institute and the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Paderborn University.
Service structures are being created at all universities. The project is supported by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
Further information can be found on the project website.
(Automatically translated with deepl)
