Industrial Partners
Our collaborations with industry are too numerous to list them all. Collaborations exist on a personal, project, and institutional level, and several spin-off companies have been formed. We regularly participate in science fairs (such as the annual CeBIT fair), and several researchers have accepted seats on the academic steering boards of companies or policy-shaping institutions within the public sector (W. Wahlster, for example, is a member of the Research Union of the German Government that is advising the German government on the development of suitable high-tech strategies). Instead of listing all our activities, we therefore restrict ourselves to three major developments here:
The Leading-Edge Cluster Competition was launched in 2007 as part of the German Federal Government's High-Tech Strategy. It is designed to pool regional potential along the entire innovation and value-added chain. The winner of the leading-edge cluster competition in the general area of information technology is the Cluster for Software Research on Innovations for Digital Companies. The cluster e ort is centered in the region in and around Darmstadt, Walldorf, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe and Saarbrücken and concerns itself with the methodological and technological research into and development of software solutions for the extensive digitization of companies. The industrial partners include notable German companies such as SAP and Software AG as well as numerous small and medium-sized enterprises.
DFKI is a core partner of the leading-edge cluster, and Wolfgang Wahlster is a member of its executive board. The newly established Innovative Retail Lab (IRL) that was established jointly by Globus, DFKI and Saarland University is an integral part of the Spitzencluster effort. IRL is chaired by Antonio Krüger.
The EIT is a new independent EU community body which was set up to address Europe's innovation gap.
The mission of the EIT is to grow and capitalize on the innovation capacity and capability of actors from higher education, research, business and entrepreneurship from the EU and beyond through the creation of highly integrated so-called Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). The EIT ICT Labs are the KIC for the future information and communication society that aims at a radical transformation of Europe into a knowledge society with a significantly increased proliferation of internet-based services. The consortium connects leading companies (including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Philips, SAP, Siemens, Telekom, Thomson), several renowned research institutes and a number of top-ranked universities.
DFKI is a core partner of the EIT ICT German node, and Wolfgang Wahlster is academic chair of its executive steering committee. The contribution of Saarland University within EIT ICT focuses on multimodal computing and interaction and is represented by the research effort in the cluster.
In May 2009 the Intel Visual Computing Institute (Intel-VCI) was formally established. Intel-VCI is a collaborative effort between Intel, Saarland University, MPI-INF, DFKI, and MPI-SWS. It is part of Saarland University and its offices are located at the Saarbrücken campus.
Intel-VCI is directed by Thorsten Herfet and Philipp Slusallek. The decision by Intel to set up Intel-VCI in Saarbrücken even in advance of a planned counterpart in the US has signi cantly been influenced by the establishment and the research of this cluster of excellence.
The institute focuses on Visual Computing research, meaning the acquisition, modeling, processing, transmission, rendering and display of visual and associated data. It addresses a highly complex combination of hard challenges: achieving highest performance and scalability, integrating multimodal data, analyzing and handling of massive data volumes, designing of efficient and scalable algorithms, efficient encoding and transmission of time dependent data, and all of this under often hard real-time constraints.
of computer graphics, computer vision, still and moving image processing, CAD, interactive simulations, geometry processing, animation, human computer interaction, parallel programming languages, compilers and tools, and many others.
Intel provides co-funding for the Intel-VCI projects and operation, and the institute is part of the Intel Labs Europe network. The Intel-VCI regularly publishes calls for proposals that are open to any research institution in Europe. It is also participating in government-sponsored R &D programs such as the European Union 7th Framework Programme.
