Agenda

Are AI robots going to take over the world or helping us to make this world a better place? This session will take you to a journey where the hidden potential of technology will be demystified based on real use cases of AI for human, earth, health and cultural heritage.

Big Data and AI are playing an increasingly important role from a venture capital fund perspective. On the one hand, because startups from these areas provide numerous investment targets. On the other hand, because more and more VC funds are also using data-based approaches to search for and identify potential startups. The presentation will show what investors look for in AI startups, how they use data themselves, and highlight and Big Data and AI startup trends from the current High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) portfolio.

Over the past few years, we experienced several trends which will impact the future of work in the financial service sector: Customers demand real-time services, employees place significantly more value on personal development, and financial institutions strive for an ever increasing degree of automation. The combination as well as the maturity of these trends consequently lead to a paradigm-shift in working patterns. To ensure a balanced business environment, it is our responsibility to design this future today. Throughout the presentation we will highlight potential cornerstones of this design.

What happens to your mobile data when your phone talks to Huawei’s 5G receiver? Can the Chinese state read along? In a lively moderated discussion, Dr. Michael Lemke will answer questions on this controversial topic.

With the unprecedented availability of satellite data, low-level access to unlimited computing power and AI and Machine Learning techniques, data-driven decisions have become a reality; what is often overlooked though is the (unintended?) side-effect of depoliticizing decision making. Data is declared ‘neutral’, complex human behaviour is reduced to 1-dimensional indices and solutionist, elitist attitudes lead to the illusion of being able to deliver ‘insights’. This talk gives an overview of the current status in satellite data and AI processing capabilities and investigates the fallacies that come with the introduction of every new technology.

The open-access dissemination of pretrained language models through online repositories has led to a democratization of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) research.
This also allows people outside of NLP to use such models and adapt them to specific use-cases.
However, a certain amount of technical proficiency is still required which is an entry barrier for users who want to apply these models to a certain task but lack the necessary knowledge or resources.
In this talk, I will present the AdapterHub Playground application. It was developed to overcome this gap by providing a tool which allows researchers to conduct text classification without writing a single line of code.
It provides an intuitive interface for training, prediction, and analysis of textual data for a variety of NLP tasks.
Besides presenting the tool's architecture, I will demonstrate its advantages with a prototypical use-case, where we show that predictive performance can easily be increased in a few-shot learning scenario.

How can you be a Corporate Executive and startup founder at the same time? In his talk, Jörg will talk about his dual experience as the Chief Digital Officer of a large Corporation and a successful startup founder. He will explain how digitalization and his efforts at LANXESS and CheMondis have started to transform the Chemical Industry and why the combination of data and specific domain knowledge is key for success.