March 25, 2022

More than 30 young scientists from the German Competence Centers for research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) met on February 22, 2022, for a special edition of the Pitch Talks event series, which has been successfully established throughout the network. The event on the topic of Explainability of AI was organized by the coordination office of the German AI network located at TU Dortmund University under the leadership of network coordinator and ML2R spokesperson Prof. Dr. Katharina Morik.

For the virtual, all-day workshop, researchers from all six competence centers came together: the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), the Competence Center Machine Learning Rhine-Ruhr (ML2R), the Tübingen AI Center (TUE.AI Center), and the Center for Scalable Data Services and Solutions (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig. After coordinator Prof. Dr. Katharina Morik welcomed the more than 30 participants and gave an overview of the network as well as of current issues regarding the Explainability of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence, topic-specific presentations from each center followed.

Thinking Outside the Box – Researchers Find Creative Solutions to Current Challenges

The second part of the event took place in the style of a World Café: The participants formed three groups and dealt intensively with topics from the field of Explainable AI (XAI). The PhD students started with a round of introductions and an exchange about their current research projects, the associated tasks, and research questions to be answered in the future. Following the credo “Think outside the box!”, they then worked out creative solutions to the problems and challenges they had previously identified. In the last part of the event, the results and work processes of the three groups were presented to all participants through posters and discussed further.

The regular Pitch Talks drive the scientific exchange between the researchers of the German network and promote the formation of cross-center working groups and collaboration on joint projects. The format will also be continued in the future with special events on overarching topics from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.