Joint ELISE-ELIAS Flagship Workshop

Key measures the projects seek to align on include an annual meeting, a European graduate project programme, a pan-EU incubation programme, and a call for sciencepreneur fellows and units akin to the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) network’s calls for Fellows and units.




Location

The venue is the NH Collection Frankfurt Spin Tower Hotel, Frankfurt, Germany.


Programme

DAY 1 (Wednesday, February 7th)

12:00-13:00 Registration & Coffee

13:00-13:15 Official Start of Workshop & Welcome by Matthias Bethge (Tübingen AI Center; ELLIS Fellow)
 

Part I: The Future of Open-Source Foundation Models

13:15-15:30 Speakers: Yann LeCun (Meta), Katharina Frey (Swiss Foreign Ministry & ICAIN), Laura Morselli (CINECA & EuroHPC), Jenia Jitsev (LAION; ELLIS Member)

14:50-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-17:00 Speakers: Ce Zhang (Together AI), Samuel Weinbach (IPAI Aleph Alpha), Daniel Naeff (Swiss AI),

17:00-18:00 Open discussion on Annual Meeting for Open Source community (e.g. AI+X pre-event on the 2nd or integrated on the 4th) starting with a few more initial spotlight presentations (Hilde Kühne; Robin Rombach; Mario Fritz, ELLIS Fellow)

Matthias Bethge (Moderator)

18:00-20:00 Joint dinner

Part II: Can Europe & academia reinvent innovation?

The urgency of foundational solutions aimed at sustainability and building healthier societies could provide an opportunity for Europe and academia to pioneer a new path to innovation.

20:00-20:45 Intro about ELIAS (Nicu Sebe, ELLIS Fellow) and briefing on ELIAS measures:

1. Sciencepreneur School & TTSS (Arnout Devos & Gregor von Dulong)
2. Hackathon (Georg Martius, ELLIS Member & Tomasz Trzcinski, ELLIS Member)
3. Pioneer Award (Michael Pfeiffer, ELLIS Member)
4. Pan-European Accelerator (Isabelle Siegrist & Daniel Naeff)
5. European graduate project program & call for sciencepreneur fellows and units (Matthias Bethge)

20:45 Time for open discussions at the hotel bar

DAY 2 (Thursday, February 8th)

09:00-09:20 Viviana Gropengiesser: “Impact Driven Entrepreneurship” (Talent Kick)

09:20-09:30 Wieland Brendel (ELLIS Scholar): “Polybot”

09:30-10:00 Isabelle Siegrist: “Building a pan-European Accelerator”.

10:00-12:00 Break out groups on:

1. How to brand/structure the ELIAS Innovation Alliance (EIA) and create a new narrative and tangible impact on innovation and entrepreneurship (Matthias Bethge & Viviana Gropengiesser)?
2. How to set up an annual meeting for AI (Daniel Naeff & Wieland Brendel)
3. How to build Sciencepreneur units to inspire students and support scientists to become entrepreneurs? (Arnout Devos)
4. How to set up a Pan-EU incubation program for AI Startups? (Isabelle Siegrist)

12:00-13:30 Joint lunch

13:30-16:00 Presentation and discussion of break-out group results.

Further spotlight presentations:

Gregor von Dulong: “Learnings from building and scaling entrepreneurship education at HPI”

Discussion of white paper

This workshop is co-organised together by the ELISE project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 951847, and the EU-funded ELIAS project under grant agreement number 101120237.