Our Mission
We are at a crossroads where
- Machine learning is at the heart of a technological and societal artificial intelligence revolution involving multiple sister disciplines, with large implications for the future competitiveness of Europe.
- Europe is not keeping up: many of the top labs, as well as many of the top places to do a PhD, are located in North America; moreover, AI investments in China and North America are significantly larger than in Europe.
- the distinction between academic research and industrial labs is vanishing, with a significant part of the basic research now being done in industry (with substantial research freedom, and higher salaries), rapid commercialization of results, and academic institutions worldwide struggling to retain their best scientists (with negative implications not only for research but also for the education of future talent). This further weakens Europe since most of the companies doing top research in this field are controlled from the US (or China) – many European companies whose future business crucially depends on AI are not perceived as competitive.
As an important measure to address these points we propose to found a European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), involving the very best European academics while working together closely with basic researchers from industry.
The mission of ELLIS is to benefit Europe in two ways:
- We want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world.
- We want to have economic impact and create jobs in Europe, and believe this is achieved by outstanding and free basic research, independent of industry interests.
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Quotes
"Google AI is a strong supporter of open research and of the idea of close collaboration between industry and academia on basic research. The ELLIS initiative can provide the ground for the development of a very strong scientific ecosystem in Europe, supporting the amazing research talent in Europe, and allowing it to bring its unique perspective to the field."
Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow and Head of Google AI
“Artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the world. In the automotive industry, it is used for autonomous driving functions, but is also just as relevant for optimising company processes. Porsche expressly supports the Ellis Initiative. We must act in order to meet our ethical responsibilities in the development and application of AI. We need research and training in this field at an excellent level – also in Europe.”
Oliver Blume, CEO of Porsche AG.
"At Facebook we believe AI brings transformative potential. To ensure it benefits everyone, we do research in the open and collaborate with academia around the world. Europe has vibrant AI talent, and we're enthusiastic about the potential for ELLIS to further boost AI research in Europe, and ensure a diverse ecosystem of experts around the globe."
Yann LeCun, Chief Scientist at Facebook AI and Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Director of Engineering at Facebook AI
AI plays a crucial role in technology today and in future and will change the world. At Bosch we focus on the development of robust, safe and explainable AI powering our products “invented for life”. Achieving excellent, world leading research in AI combined with close academia - industry collaboration will ensure the European competitiveness in this space, therefore Bosch supports the ELLIS initiative.
Michael Bolle, CDO & CTO Robert Bosch GmbH
“Europe is home to some of the leading international research groups in artificial intelligence. These technologies have the potential to improve our lives. The development is still in its infancy, and ELLIS wants to ensure that the highest level of research in this field will continue to be performed in the open societies of Europe.”
Bernhard Schölkopf, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
"Through deep learning, compute power and big data we have now reached a threshold where AI drives innovation in industry and shapes the society of tomorrow. To maintain prosperity and European values, Europe must act now. ELLIS is the perfect vehicle to become a major player in AI.
Max Welling, Research Chair at the University of Amsterdam and Vice President Technologies at Qualcomm.
“ELLIS represents pioneering leaders in AI research from across Europe. By working together, we can build AI systems which will benefit all our societies.”
Adrian Weller, Program Director for AI at The Alan Turing Institute
“Since 1965, Europeans have created most of the basic ingredients of Deep Learning and modern AI. ELLIS will help to continue this tradition."
Jürgen Schmidhuber, Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (USI & SUPSI), Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of NNAISENSE
“Researchers from all across Europe are pushing and advancing the state of the art in AI. We are committed to pushing the boundary of AI on behalf of our customers with our teams in many European cities and are looking forward to collaborating with ELLIS researchers.”
Ralf Herbrich, Director Machine Learning at Amazon.
“Given the profound impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) not only on our economy and labor market but also on our society, Europe urgently needs to invest in nurturing, developing, attracting and retaining top talent in AI and particularly in machine learning related fields. ELLIS is a great initiative to enable us Europeans to achieve this goal and that’s why I support it”
Nuria Oliver, Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone; Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering
Ellis will be an important milestone tightening European collaborations and synergies in the field of ML. Ellis is a wake-up call to European policy makers to finally vigorously act upon a topic that is essential for the future of Europe requiring high investments.
Klaus-Robert Müller, Professor of Machine Learning, Technical University Berlin, Member of Leopoldina
