Consortium

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) was founded in 1988 as a non-profit public-private partnership and now has around 40 Million annual turnover and 500 full-time employees. It has research facilities in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, and Bremen and a project office in Berlin. It is the largest European research center devoted solely to Artificial Intelligence and its applications. Research and development projects are conducted in seventeen research departments and research groups, which cover a broad range of AI-related areas, from Deep Learning fundamentals through Robotics, the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and autonomous driving to Human-Computer Interaction. 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 Energy (BMWi), the German Federal States, and the German Research Foundation (DFG), as well as from direct cooperation with industrial partners. Beyond academic excellence, DFKI sees its mission as making a real-world impact and facilitating the effective transfer of cutting-edge technology to the European industry. Since its founding 30 years ago, 60 spin-off companies have resulted from DFKI projects. DFKI has a long history of complex AI and ML-based applications in real-world environments. The Embedded Intelligence Lab in Kaiserslautern that leads the DFKI participation in Allegro focuses on extracting context information on complex real-world processes from noisy sensor data and building adaptive context-sensitive services on top of such information. In previous EU projects such as SimpleSkin, ALLOW Ensembles, and CIMPLEX or EIT Digital Smart Construction, a variety of such systems were developed. DFKI has a strong interest in Agriculture, including past projects such as iGreen (BMBF) and RAPR (EU EFRE). To bundle smart agriculture projects, DFKI as an institution operates a Competence Center on Smart Agriculture (CC-SAT saaat.dfki.de).

As part of the SustainML project, DFKI as a research institute mainly targets publication venues in the ubiquitous computing, machine learning and IoT fields including ACM IMWUT, IEEE IoT, Elsevier Information Fusion, etc. to address fundamental research in the rising field of sustainable and energy-efficient design and implementation of AI solutions. Throughout the designated work packages, DFKI leads WP1: Energy Consumption Oriented ML Task Modeling, focusing on developing a pipeline to provide machine learning solutions from text-based user input. As a core competence in this field, ongoing research targets knowledge representations of the Machine Learning landscape and the utilization of such knowledge to map structured user input to AI model databases through Retrieval-Augmented-Generation based Large Language Models. Since WP1 is part of the core functionality within the SustainML framework, strong collaboration with project partners is of major importance to ensure flexibility and adaptability within the framework. For the outcome of the SustainML project, DFKI envisions the targeted framework as an assistant to help accelerate DFKI’s and others' research in developing AI solutions in all application domains including public and industrial projects.