“AI made in NRW” goes USA: KI.NRW on a delegation trip with NRW Minister President

Dr. Christian Temath accompanies Hendrik Wüst to one of the world’s most important tech locations

From April 14-19, North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister President Hendrik Wüst will travel to the west coast of the USA with delegates from science, culture and business. The trip will focus on the topics of artificial intelligence (AI) and security policy. Dr. Christian Temath, Managing Director of the North Rhine-Westphalian competence platform KI.NRW, will accompany the delegation as an expert on the topic of AI. Visits will include Microsoft and Google, the prestigious Stanford University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Los Angeles/San Francisco/Seattle. The West Coast is the global center of the IT and high-tech industries, with products that have changed the way we live and work in recent decades. Microchips, personal computers, and smartphones have long since become an integral part of our everyday lives – groundbreaking technologies that owe much of their origin to local factors. The region’s secret recipe: a high concentration of know-how, pioneering spirit, investors and intensive networking.

Minister President Hendrik Wüst will be promoting North Rhine-Westphalia as an investment location during his trip to the USA. “North Rhine-Westphalia is the top German state for foreign investment. That speaks to the attractiveness of our location and our policy of transformation. I will be promoting our outstanding conditions in the USA. We aim to further expand our potential in business and research in order to maintain and create good and secure jobs,” says Hendrik Wüst, Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia.

AI solutions from NRW are internationally competitive
The topic of artificial intelligence will play a central role in the delegation’s trip. As a leading location for applied AI in Germany, NRW relies on close cooperation between cutting-edge research and entrepreneurship and specifically supports large, socially relevant joint AI projects with state funding. “AI holds many great opportunities for the economy. AI solutions ‘made in NRW’ are already achieving real efficiency gains and are also in demand from customers outside Germany,” says Dr. Christian Temath, Managing Director of the competence platform KI.NRW. “It is crucial that humans are at the center of the development of AI systems. Only if AI is designed to be trustworthy it will be accepted and be able to survive on the market in the long term. I am certain that this approach will also create competitive advantages internationally in the future.” Together with the USA, a proven partner in business, science, and values, we can achieve a great deal here.”

Transatlantic AI Symposium in San Francisco
The delegation will travel to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle with planned visits to renowned tech companies and research institutions. Additionally, the Transatlantic AI Symposium will be held in San Francisco on April 17 as part of the NRW-USA Year. Organized by NRW.Global Business, the event will present key players in the North Rhine-Westphalian AI ecosystem to a local audience in the presence of Hendrik Wüst. In addition to Dr. Christian Temath, the event will feature speakers including Lucie Flek, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn and Area Chair for Natural Language Processing at the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, as well as quantum physicist and Chair of the Board at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Prof. Astrid Lambrecht.

The Lamarr Institute is endowed with permanent institutional funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. High-performance, trustworthy and resource-efficient AI applications are researched and developed at the Dortmund, Bonn and Sankt Augustin sites. A globally unique quantum supercomputer will be created at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in collaboration with the Siegen-based start-up eleQtron. This also makes the research centre an important driver of structural change in the Rhineland mining region. The supercomputers from Jülich are essential for research and development, as AI applications in particular require a lot of computing capacity.

KI.NRW shows the diversity of the AI ecosystem in NRW on a map with more than 1100 entries: https://www.ki.nrw/ki-landkarte.

Further information

• KI-Flagships powered by KI.NRW: https://www.ki.nrw/flagships/
• Transatlantic AI Symposium in San Francisco: https://lu.ma/n911bq4k
• Website Lamarr Institute: https://lamarr-institute.org/

About KI.NRW

KI.NRW is the central point of contact for artificial intelligence in North Rhine-Westphalia. KI.NRW supports the transformation of North Rhine-Westphalia into a nationwide leading location for applied artificial intelligence. The aim is to accelerate the transfer of AI from cutting-edge research to industry, to establish a model region for professional qualification in AI and to promote the social dialog about AI. In doing so, KI.NRW places people and their ethical principles at the center of the design of artificial intelligence. KI.NRW is funded by the state ministries MWIKE and MKW and managed by one of Europe’s leading research institutes in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS in Sankt Augustin.

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