Track B: Robotics and AI

Track B: Robotics and AI

The fields of robotics and industrial AI are rapidly advancing, reshaping existing industries and driving innovation. Track B: “Robotics and Industrial AI,” delves into technologies and the latest breakthroughs that are transforming the landscape of modern production. Participants will explore essential and fundamental topics such as Human-Robot Collaboration, Digital Twins and Asset Administration Shells, Large Action Models and even rescue robotics for disaster relief. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in hands-on workshops, live laboratory demo-tours and lectures, applying theoretical knowledge to practical scenarios. Join us for a deep dive into the world of Robotics and Industrial AI and discover how these technologies are revolutionizing industries.

Monday, September 9, 2024

Keynote 1
13:30-14:30

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (DFKI)

Professor Wolfgang Wahlster is a pioneer of AI in Germany and Europe as a founding director of the DFKI. He has served as an elected President of three international AI organizations: IJCAII, EurAI, and ACL. He is an elected Fellow of AAAI, EurAI, and GI. He laid some of the foundations for multimodal dialog systems, user modelling, and speech-to-speech translation cyber-physical production systems for the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), a concept that he coined in 2010. Wahlster is a member of the Nobel Prize Academy in Stockholm, the German National Academy Leopoldina and three other prestigious academies. For his research, he has been awarded the German Future Prize, and the Grand Cross of Merit by the Federal President of Germany. (for more info see: https://www.wolfgang-wahlster.de/)

Industrial AI for Smart Manufacturing

In the next decade of Industry 4.0 a new generation of AI technologies will take smart factories to a new level. Large Language Models (LLMs) will be complemented by Large Process Models (LPMs) and Large Action Models (LAMs), so that generative AI models not only predict what to say or visualize next, but also what to do next with explanations of why these actions make sense.
Although deep learning is the most powerful machine learning method developed to date, it has already reached its inherent limits in many industrial application domains. It must be combined with various symbolic approaches in new system architectures. This leads to hybrid LxM (x=L,P, or M) technologies that use holonic multiagent architectures for combining neural approaches with symbolic reasoning technologies such as constraint solving, physics-based simulation and terminological reasoning in knowledge graphs.

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Keynote 2
9:00-10:00

Karën Fort (LORIA)

Karën Fort is a Professor at Université de Lorraine and does her research at the LORIA laboratory in Nancy, in the Inria team Semagramme. Her primary research interest is ethics in natural language processing (NLP), of which she is a pioneer: she organized the first colloquium on the subject in 2014, in France, followed by a national workshop (ETeRNAL 2015 and 2020) and a special issue of the TAL journal in 2016. She initiated the ethics and NLP French blog (http://www.ethique-et-tal.org/) as well as the first survey on ethics in NLP (Fort & Couillault, 2016). She was co-chair of the first two ethics committees in the field (EMNLP 2020 and NAACL 2021) and is co-chair of the ethics committee of the association for computational linguistics (ACL). Beside her work on stereotypical biases (Névéol et al., 2022), she is interested in deontological ethics using NLP4NLP techniques (Abdalla et al, 2023).

Ethics in Natural Language Processing: don't look up!

With the success of neural methods, NLP has undergone a major revolution in the past decade: we now have (lots of) real users. Although the field already had an impact on society 10 years ago, it was easier to ignore. Ethics has now become a central issue. In this talk, I will show what can go wrong when we develop a system, if we are not careful enough. I’ll also provide tools and methodologies to better evaluate the impact of our work. More importantly, I’ll show that the issues we are facing are not limited to stereotypical biases and that we need to learn to question our work on a larger scale, as ethical thinking helps developing better systems.

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Thursday, September 12, 2024

RICAIP – Day at ZEMA Saarbrücken

Robotics-Lab Tour

Tim Schwartz (DFKI)

Dr.-Ing. Tim Schwartz studied computer science and computational linguistics at Saarland University.
He received his PhD with the thesis “The Always Best Positioned Paradigm for Mobile Indoor Applications” in 2012.
Since 2016, he is the head of the human-robot communications group and leads the German-Czech Innovation Lab for Human-Robot Collaboration MRK 4.0.

Practical Tour through the German-Czech Innovation Lab for Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrie 4.0 (MRK 4.0 Lab)

In this tour, we will show you around in our german-Czech Innovation Lab for Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrie 4.0, or MRK 4.0 Lab for short. As the name implies, we focus on Human-Robot Collaboration. In extension we also deal with human-robot communication, the orchestration of hybrid teams (i.e. teams consisting of humans, robots and software agents) and practical applications of Industrial AI, Asset Administration Shells, Digital Twins and general Industrie 4.0 topics. Human-Robot communication is not necessarily limited to spoken or written language, but includes all sorts of modalities: from more traditional control units, over manual teach-in to Augmented and Virtual Reality etc. We will show you practical examples from different projects, we are currently working on or have been working on in the past, encouraging questions and discussions throughout the whole experience. 

Friday, September 13, 2024

Course 8
9:00-11:30

Dr. Maurice Rekrut (DFKI)

Dr. Maurice Rekrut is a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). In 2023 he received his PhD in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger for the thesis “Leveraging EEG-based Speech Imagery Brain-Computer Interfaces”. Since 2020 he is the head of Cognitive Assistants BCI-Lab which focuses on the application of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) in real-world scenarios. He is involved in several national und international research projects concerning this topic as for example EXPECT, BISON, NEARBY or HAIKU.

The NEARBY Project - Developing Noise and Variability-free BCI systems for out-of-the-lab use

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