North Rhine-Westphalia has become home to a new unit within the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), one of Europe’s leading networks for artificial intelligence research. The newly approved ELLIS Unit NRW brings together leading AI researchers and large-scale computing infrastructure across the region to advance open-source foundation models, trustworthy machine learning, and AI applications for real-world environments.
The unit will include over forty principal investigators and more than three hundred doctoral researchers and postdoctoral scientists across North Rhine-Westphalia. Planned activities include joint research initiatives, doctoral training, summer schools, and collaborations with industry and public-sector partners. The long-term goal is to establish a sustainable European AI ecosystem that combines foundational research, open scientific collaboration, and real-world applications.
A central focus of the unit is the development and study of open-source generalist foundation models – large AI or machine learning models that are trained on massive amounts of data and capable at solving certain tasks – as core building blocks for machine learning research. Researchers will investigate how such models can be trained openly, made more reliable and adapted safely to different application domains. The unit will also strengthen research on trustworthy AI, particularly in situations involving uncertainty, rare events, or sensitive real-world environments. A further research track focuses on the transfer of machine learning methods into application domains including healthcare, sustainable agriculture, and embodied AI systems such as autonomous robots.
At the University of Cologne, the ELLIS Unit NRW is locally supported by the Key Profile Area ‘Earth’ (Intelligent Methods for Earth System Sciences), which connects advanced AI and machine learning methods with research on climate, weather, environmental processes, and other urgent challenges in Earth system science.
“This new network is an excellent example of researchers coming together to address how society can profit from AI technologies beyond profit-oriented commercial applications. This is very much in line with the University’s value-based AI strategy. Membership in this network also shows that the research conducted in the University of Cologne’s Key Profile Areas makes meaningful contributions to international endeavours,” says Professor Dr Joybrato Mukherjee, Rector of the University of Cologne.
Professor Dr Aleksandar Bojchevski at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Computer Science says, “With the ELLIS Unit NRW, Cologne becomes part of this European network of excellence, contributing its strengths in trustworthy and efficient AI, algorithmic foundations, information theory, and AI for Earth system sciences. Importantly, this opens up new opportunities for our students and early-career researchers through joint supervision, research visits, summer schools, and larger-scale collaborations across NRW and Europe.”
Professor Dr Susanne Crewell, one of the speakers of the Key Profile Area ‘Earth’, adds, “The Unit is an opportunity to make Cologne’s AI community more visible and to integrate cutting-edge AI research across the university and across disciplines. Our broader vision is for the Unit to become a catalyst for an NRW-wide AI ecosystem that combines scientific excellence, international visibility, and sustained institutional support.”
ELLIS was created by AI researchers in 2018 to provide opportunities and funding for AI research in Europe and to ensure that the continent keeps up with developments in the USA and China. Several European governments as well as the involved universities and research institutions contribute funding, allowing the network to create research sites distributed across Europe and Israel.
The founding institutions of the ELLIS Unit NRW are RWTH Aachen University, Bielefeld University, the University of Bonn, the University of Cologne, TU Dortmund University, Ruhr University Bochum, Forschungszentrum Jülich and Paderborn University. It is coordinated by Juergen Gall (University of Bonn) together with a board of co-directors from the participating institutions, including Bastian Leibe (RWTH Aachen University), Barbara Hammer (Bielefeld University), Aleksandar Bojchevski (University of Cologne), Katharina Eggensperger (TU Dortmund University), Jenia Jitsev (Forschungszentrum Jülich) and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo (Paderborn University), as well as Asja Fischer (Ruhr University Bochum).
Media Contact:
Professor Dr Aleksandar Bojchevski
Institute of Computer Science, University of Cologne
a.bojchevski(at)uni-koeln(dot)de
Press and Communications Team:
Eva Schissler
+49 221 470 4030
e.schissler(at)verw.uni-koeln(dot)de
Further information:
https://ellis.eu/news/seven-new-units-join-the-ellis-network-czechia-denmark-franconia-grenoble-nrw-slovenia-sweden