Project Details
Projekt Print View

EXC 284:  Multimodal Computing and Interaction - Robust, Efficient and Intelligent Processing of Text, Speech, Visual Data and High Dimensional Representations

Subject Area Computer Science
Term from 2007 to 2019
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 39134088
 
Final Report Year 2019

Final Report Abstract

The advent of the digital society has brought dramatic changes in the way we live and work. Digital content is available in different modalities such as text, audio, images, and video, The cluster has addressed the challenge to organize, understand, and search multimodal information in a robust, efficient, intelligent, and privacy preserving manner, and to create dependable systems that support natural and intuitive multimodal interaction. It comprised researchers from Saarland University (computer science, mathematics, and language science and technology), the Max Planck Institutes for Informatics and for Software Systems, and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. It has been tremendously successful along the following axes:  Research output.  Qualification of young scientists.  Impact on the development of Saarland University. The research output is highly impressive in quality, numbers, and collaboration across research areas. A highlight of our work is the YAGO knowledge base. YAGO contains several million facts about more than a million entities, extracted automatically from Wikipedia. It is a breakthrough in quality and quantity. It was basic to much of the research done in the cluster on the interface between computer science and computational linguistics, and it is the blueprint for all knowledge bases built since then, e.g. by Google and Microsoft. The paper has been cited already more than 3000 times. Other highlights are our work on markerless performance capture and on visual grounding of semantic concepts. The cluster promoted early career researchers through its independent research group program (more than 50% of the funds went into this program) and its postdoc and PhD programs. More than 230 students did their PhD work in the cluster and more than 200 early career researchers of the cluster moved on to faculty positions worldwide. Alumni of the cluster have received 10 DFG Emmy Noether grants, 20 ERC starting and 6 ERC Consolidator grants. The PIs and senior researchers of the cluster also received prestigious grants and awards, e.g., one ERC synergy, five ERC advanced grants, and one Leibniz award. Saarland University and the Saarland had made a substantial sustainabilty commitment; it was more than fulfilled and 11 high-profile appointments at the full and associate professor level have been made, further strengthening informatics as the flagship discipline of the university and further deepening its connection to other disciplines. The institutions participating in the cluster form the Saarland Informatics Cluster (SIC). During the lifetime of the cluster, SIC has grown substantially. In particular, the Center for IT-Security, Privacy, and Accountability (CISPA) was established as a BMBF competence center in 2011 and became the CISPA Helmholtz Center for IT-Security in 2018. SIC is now a unique concentration of informatics research in Europe.

Publications

 
 

Additional Information

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung