Successful application of the research cluster on "Machine Learning in Science"
Prof. Philipp Berens from the Institute for Ophthalmic Research is one of the speakers of this new initiative to promote scientific excellence in Germany
Funding decisions have now been made in Germany’s Excellence Strategy, a programme designed to strengthen top-level research at universities in Germany. On 27 September 2018, the Excellence Commission, consisting of the members of the international Committee of Experts and the research ministers of the federal and state governments, approved 57 Clusters of Excellence to be funded from among the 88 proposed projects.
The University of Tübingen is to have three new Clusters of Excellence. As part of the German government’s Excellence Strategy funding for higher education research, Tübingen will host new outstanding research networks starting in January 2019. Representatives of Germany’s higher education policymakers announced the decision in Bonn on Thursday. This means that Tübingen has passed another key test in the German government’s Excellence funding program. With three approvals in the Cluster of Excellence funding line, the University of Tübingen can once again apply for University of Excellence status.
“This achievement reflects the culture of commitment and cooperation at the University of Tübingen,” he said. Professor Engler expressed confidence that the Clusters of Excellence and other areas would benefit from world-class research in Tübingen.
In direct connection to the Institute for Ophthalmic Research Tübingen is the funded cluster "Machine Learning in Science - New Perspectives". The rise of “intelligent” technology is transforming engineering, industry and the economy at an increasing pace and on an unprecedented scale. At the core of this revolution are breakthroughs in the field of machine learning which allow machines to perform tasks that, until recently, could only be performed by humans. Less prominently discussed, developments in machine learning have the potential to transform science at an equally fundamental level. While machine learning methods have been used in the past to tackle isolated prediction problems, recent breakthroughs open up an exciting new opportunity: Automated inference methods will become increasingly useful in the process of scientific discovery itself, supporting scientists in identifying which hypotheses to test, which experiments to perform, and how to extract principles describing a broad range of phenomena.
The aim of this cluster is to enable machine learning to take a central role in all aspects of scientific discovery and to understand how such a transformation will impact the scientific approach as a whole.
The speakers for the Cluster are informatics professor Ulrike von Luxburg and vision scientist Professor Philipp Berens. The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Knowledge Media Research Center Tübingen are partners in the Cluster.
More info under https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/core-research/machine-learning-new-perspectives-for-science/home/
