On December 9th, 2019 Philipp Slusallek, Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), presented a seminar at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz.
Understanding the World with AI: Training and Validating AI Systems Using Synthetic Data
The world around us is highly complex but AI Systems must be able to reliably make accurate decisions that in many cases may even affect human lives. With Digital Reality we propose an approach that instead of only relying on real data, learns models of the real world and uses synthetic sensor data generated via simulations for the training and -- even more importantly -- the validation of AI Systems. This is extended by a continuous process of validating the models against the real world for improving and adapting the models to a changing environment.
A highly relevant application of this approach is autonomous driving as well in more general term intelligent sensor systems. Using a model about the objects to be measured and the measuring process these systems are aware of what and how they are measuring and can adapt the measuring strategy and parameters accordingly, e.g. to obtain more accurate measurements or achieve higher throughput.
Philipp Slusallek is Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where he heads the research area on Agents and Simulated Reality. At Saarland University he has been a professor for Computer Graphics since 1999, a principle investigator at the German Excellence-Cluster on “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” since 2007, and Director for Research at the Intel Visual Computing Institute since 2009. Before coming to Saarland University, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. He originally studied physics in Frankfurt and Tübingen (Diploma/M.Sc.) and got his PhD in Computer Science from Erlangen University. He is associate editor of Computer Graphics Forum, a fellow of Eurographics, a member of acatech (German National Academy of Science and Engineering), and a member of the European High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence.
His research covers a wide range of topics including artificial Intelligence, simulated/digital reality, computational sciences, real-time realistic graphics, high-performance computing, motion modeling & synthesis, novel programming models, 3D-Internet technology, and others.