Service Centre WestAI supports the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) with technologies and services
WestAI is one of four service centres across Germany that have started work to make it easier for companies and research institutions to access AI applications and to provide support with 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 do you make companies and organisations 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 it soon be possible to record and search the content of huge data archives in detail in seconds thanks to artificial intelligence? With WestAI, NRW now has a regional service centre that is driving forward AI research in Germany and promoting the transfer of scientific findings into practice.
The new service centre 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, the RWTH Aachen University, the Jülich Research Centre, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and the Technical University of Dortmund.
"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 Centre (DLR).
Further information can be found on the project website.
This text has been translated automatically.
