Helsinki and FCAI will host a new ELLIS unit for top AI research

Finnish artificial intelligence research received a significant acknowledgement. Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI will host one of the new European units of top AI research, as the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems will establish one of its first units in Finland.

The first ELLIS units were announced at the ELLIS assembly on 10 December as a part of the NeurIPS 2019 conference. From left to right: Yoshua Bengio, Bernhard Schölkopf, Nuria Olivier, Matthias Bethge, Max Welling, Director of FCAI Samuel Kaski, Se… — The first ELLIS units were announced at the ELLIS assembly on 10 December as a part of the NeurIPS 2019 conference. From left to right: Yoshua Bengio, Bernhard Schölkopf, Nuria Olivier, Matthias Bethge, Max Welling, Director of FCAI Samuel Kaski, Sepp Hochreiter, and Yann LeCun.

ELLIS is a pan-European effort initiated in 2018 to secure the excellence of European machine learning research. It aims to ensure that Europe continues to be competitive with big economies, such as the US and China, and benefit from the newest findings of AI research.

With the units, ELLIS wants to strengthen European AI research and collaboration between European researchers.

The unit will be founded in Aalto University and the University of Helsinki and hosted by the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI. Samuel Kaski, the Director of FCAI and Academy Professor at Aalto University, sees this as an excellent opportunity to boost basic AI research, which is the basis of all AI-related applications and impact. “Finland is very strong in AI research, and this new status is one indication of that.”

Professor Kaski believes that the ELLIS unit helps Finland to maintain its position as an attractive destination for top-level international researchers. It also gives current AI researchers in Finland more reasons to stay.

ELLIS aims to offer European researchers outstanding opportunities to carry out their research in Europe, and to nurture the next generation of young researchers in the important field of AI. All ELLIS units will arrange visits and events as well as provide funding for doctoral students in the ELLIS PhD programme.

The other cities selected to host a unit are Alicante, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Delft, Freiburg, Linz, Lausanne, Leuven, Oxford, Prague, Saarbrücken, Tel Aviv, Tübingen, Vienna, and Zürich.

Further information
Samuel Kaski
Professor, Aalto University
Director, FCAI
Phone +358 50 3058 694
samuel.kaski at aalto.fi

Photos from the ELLIS assembly at the NeurIPS 2019 conference.