Unit Innsbruck

The mission of the ELLIS Unit Innsbruck is to consolidate and expand AI and ML research in Western Austria, to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, and to develop strong connections with other ELLIS Units and global AI/ML research centers. The Unit will focus on advancing the capacities of AI systems to understand real-world principles and phenomena, enabling them to generalize beyond training data, to generate interpretable explanations, and to solve challenges in science, medicine and technology.

Research at the Innsbruck ELLIS Unit will be centered around machine understanding, powered e.g. by learning strong models that provide value beyond mapping input to output such as generalization to out-of-distribution situations or generating explanations. This research is driven by the following application areas:

• autonomous robotics
• advancing science by automated generation and verification of hypotheses
• precision and personalized medicine, e.g. understanding tumor-immune cell interactions for advancing cancer (immuno)therapy
• recommender systems and user modelling for understanding user preferences
• natural language processing for understanding temporal information contained in unstructured documents
• quantum ML and quantum-inspired classical ML, e.g. projective simulation for interpretable ML, and ML systems that create new quantum experiments