FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Amazon.com will open an artificial intelligence research center in the German university city of Tuebingen, creating 100 jobs over the next five years. It joins BMW, Bosch, Daimler, Facebook and Porsche in backing a German initiative launched last year and focused on areas such as robotics, machine learning and computer vision. The research center will be located adjacent to the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and draw on the expertise of two of its experts, Prof. Bernhard Schoelkopf and Prof. Michael J. Black. Schoelkopf is co-inventor of technology that enables computers to understand causality. "It's at the heart of every decision taken by machine learning," said Ralf Herbrich, Amazon's director of machine learning.

With an understanding of causality, artificial intelligence systems can predict customer behavior in response to automated decisions, Herbrich told Reuters, noting this can be used to order online search results to improve the user experience.