KIT’s Smart Data Innovation Lab Offers Transfer Services For Companies
Infrastructure, tools, technologies and processes for projects based on data and methods of artificial intelligence (AI): This transfer service makes the Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL) easier to use for companies in the form of a service catalogue. Interested companies can select current AI methods and infrastructures from the range and thus advance their own innovations more quickly. Coordinated by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the SDIL bundles the expertise of AI researchers and industrial partners.
“Our aim is to bring top German AI research directly to companies,” says Professor Michael Beigl, spokesman for SDIL and head of the Telecooperation Office (TECO) at KIT. “The services provided uniformly in the SDIL are important in order to facilitate technology transfer and to simplify access to the concentrated AI expertise of several research institutions for companies.” The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the development of the transfer service catalog and the testing of this Services in the construction phase in 2023 and 2024.
The SDIL was founded in 2014 as a “data clean room” for research on industrial data and is now addressing interested companies directly for the first time with the Smart Data Innovation Services. They can benefit from the expertise of all partners involved in SDIL: On the research side, these are the KIT as coordinator, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and the Research Center Jülich. On the industry side, the providers are IBM, SAP and Software AG, as well as Sicos BW GmbH as a link between research and industry.
Project call: Free access to AI infrastructure and AI competence
Interested companies can apply in a total of three rounds of tenders with innovative AI project ideas. The prerequisite for the application is that you can profitably use the “Innovation Services” offered – from the areas of large language models, image recognition, embedded and data-saving AI – in your own products or processes. The application deadline for the second call for applications is September 20, 2023.
The projects selected by the SDIL steering committee can then, funded by the BMBF, receive transfer payments worth up to 50,000 euros. In addition, up to 10,000 GPU hours can be used on a high-performance GPU cluster operated by KIT, as well as cloud services from industrial partners.
More information about the offer and the application
Projects of the first round of tenders started
In the projects selected in the first call for proposals, researchers from KIT produce and validate AI models for Aleph Alpha GmbH. Another project aims to improve the detection of vine leaf diseases with the support of Forschungszentrum Jülich and the AI accelerator and cloud systems provided.
Smart Data Innovation Day in November
The Smart Data Innovation Day on November 16, 2023 in St. Augustin also offers access to SDIL experts and exchange between AI competence centers. More information will follow shortly on the SDIL News page.
About the Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL)
The Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL) is an exchange and operating platform to accelerate cooperation between business, the public sector and research in the field of artificial intelligence, big data and smart data technologies. The concept for the SDIL was developed in the “Education and Research for the Digital Future” working group at the Federal Government’s National IT Summit in 2014. The SDIL provides collaborative research projects with modern analysis functions that can be used to evaluate data from companies (real data sources) and from publicly available data sources.