The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) was founded in 1988 as a nonprofit publicprivate partnership. It has research facilities in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken and Bremen, Niedersachsen, laboratories in Berlin and Darmstadt, and branch offices in Lübeck and Trier. In the field of innovative commercial software technology using Artificial Intelligence, DFKI is the leading research center in Germany.
Based on application oriented basic research, DFKI develops product functions, prototypes and patentable solutions in the field of information and communication technology. Research and development projects are conducted in 27 research departments, nine competence centers and eight living labs. Funding is received from government agencies like the European Union, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the German Federal States and the German Research Foundation (DFG), as well as from cooperation with industrial partners. Twice a year, a committee of internationally renowned experts (Scientific Advisory Board) audits the progress and results of statefunded projects. DFKI conducts research on “humancentric AI” in the major groundbreaking areas of AI research and applications with a focus on socially relevant topics and scientific excellence.
We are convinced that AI technologies can help in meeting the great societal challenges we face such as manmade global warming, social injustices, and dangerous diseases. We dedicate ourselves with great energy to work on AI solutions to these tasks. As the largest, independent AI research center worldwide, we initiate, realize and support many activities to develop reliable and trustworthy AI and secure a leading role for Germany and Europe in the international competition.
Website https://www.dfki.de/en/web
Role in Fluently WP4 Leader
Dr. Alain Pagani studied computer science at the Ecole Centrale (Lyon, France, 2001) and at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany, 2003). He started his career as a researcher at the Augmented Reality department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany). In 2008, he participated to the creation of the Augmented Vision department of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, where he currently acts as deputy director. He obtained his PhD from the University of Kaiserslautern with a thesis entitled “Reality Models for efficient registration in Augmented Reality”, in which he tackled the problem or real-time pose estimation for AR using various mathematical models of real scenes.
His research interests include Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Image Understanding, Augmented Reality and Machine Learning, and he published over 60 articles in conferences and journals. Parallel to his work at DFKI, he gives lectures at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (“Computer Vision: Object and People Tracking”, and “3D Computer Vision”).
In his recent research activities, he contributes to European projects (Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programme), with applications such as Extended Reality for telecooperation (“CORTEX²”), Human-Robot interactino (“Fluently”), vision-based process control for production sites (“HyperCOG”), Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing for Law Enforcement Agencies (“INFINITY”) as well as to industrial applications.
Responsible for Natural Language Interaction for Fluently at DFKI: Bernd Kiefer
Bernd Kiefer received his diploma in computer science in April 1989, with minor subject Electrical Engineering from Saarland University. Starting 1990, he is software engineer and researcher at DFKI Language Technology lab, now Multilinguality and Language Technology. He was Principal Investigator for the DFKI group in the EU projects Aliz-E (2014-2015) and PAL (03/2015-02/2019), with focus on of human-robot natural language interaction in an eHealth scenario, and the DFKI internal HySociaTea project on collaborative human-robot interaction in an industry 4.0 scenario.
His research focus covered varying topics over time, starting with efficient algorithms for the interpretation of natural langue using constraint grammars and their use in speech-based conversational systems, over ontology-based information extraction and intelligent web portals, to speech recognition applications. In the last years, he worked on adaptive dialogue systems for long-term human-robot interactions with complex interaction memories and belief states.