AI research centre gets Carl Zeiss backing to unlock "mystery" of machine learning

The Carl Zeiss Foundation is funding the establishment of a new artificial intelligence (AI) research centre in Mainz, Germany, that will focus on determining why modern machine learning methods are so effective. The new Emergent AI Center is being established at the Institute of Computer Science at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), and will receive €3m over the next three years from the optoelectronics company. A core focus on the AI research centre will be unlocking greater understanding about machine learning, one of the most widely used types of AI that in many fields now matches human-level performance. "Modern machine learning methods allow us to solve many problems using computers which just a few years ago, without doubt, only humans were able to handle successfully," said Professor Michael Wand of the Institute of Computer Science at JGU. "Of course we know exactly how the systems work, but why they work so well remains a mystery." Machine learning advances have occurred due to the development of what are known as deep artificial neural networks.