Start of the leading AI conference NeurIPS

Next Sunday, December 6th, the internationally leading AI conference NeurIPS, which will take place virtually this year, will begin. A total of 9,450 scientific papers were submitted this year, of which 1,900 papers were accepted, an increase of almost 200% compared to 2017. According to an analysis by Criteo, American technology companies and universities dominate the list of conference papers this year as well.

In terms of countries, the USA leads by far the list of the strongest AI countries in research with more than 1,186 accepted contributions, followed by China (259) and Great Britain (205). Germany follows in 6th place (70), just behind Switzerland (90). In total, Europe including Great Britain and Switzerland provides 520 expert contributions.

A breakdown by institution shows that, in addition to US universities such as Stanford (104), MIT (100) and UC Berkeley (89), it is the American technology companies and their research departments that are leading in AI research. First and foremost Google. Including its London-based subsidiary DeepMind, the US company contributes 237 , followed by Microsoft (95) and Facebook (58).

However, the analysis by dida of the German contributions also reveals some glimmers of hope for Germany as an AI location. After all, Germany can also boast top-level AI research. Measured by the number of accepted contributions, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (13) based in Tübingen is the leader, ahead of the Technical University of Munich (10), the University of Tübingen (8) and the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science (8) based in Saarbrücken. However, companies such as Robert Bosch GmbH (6) also carry out top-class AI research.

Viewed on a map, the south or southwest of Germany is a leader in AI research, with a focus on the university city of Tübingen (22), Munich (13) and Saarbrücken (12).

Germany is also well represented at the event itself. Besides Prof. Dr. Ulrike von Luxburg (University of Tübingen) on the board of directors, Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen) is also represented on the advisory board of the NeurIPS organisation. In addition to Zalando, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is also acting as sponsor this year.

dida also contributes a technical paper at the NeurIPS this year. An article in which dida founder and CTO Lorenz Richter participated was accepted. Lorenz Richter: "We at dida see ourselves as a company at the interface between research and application. For this reason, we at dida are looking for mathematicians and physicists who have many years of experience in research. In this way, we want to contribute to ensuring that AI researchers do not migrate abroad and at the same time are able to apply the results of their research. At the same time, we want to enable our employees to continue doing top-class AI research in order to further advance the development of AI in Germany and not to rely solely on the development of new AI methods by American technology companies and universities".

You'll find Lorenz paper here.