The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and KIT Freundeskreis und Fördergesellschaft e.V. (KFG) have awarded the 2024 Heinrich Hertz Guest Professorship to Dr. Cordelia Schmid. Schmid, a computer scientist, is Research Director at the French research institute INRIA. On Tuesday, October 22, 2024, she will speak about her work in a public lecture entitled “Multimodales Verstehen von Video-Datenströmen und Bild-Sprache gesteuerte Robotik” (multimodal understanding of video data streams and controlling robots with video and speech). The lecture will be held at 5:00 p.m. in the Johann-Gottfried-Tulla lecture hall on KIT’s Campus South (building 11.40, Englerstraße 11, 76131 Karlsruhe). On the following day, Schmid will speak with KIT students in a seminar.
Schmid is being honored for her outstanding research achievements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). In her lecture, she will present her current research on AI systems that can simultaneously and effectively process large volumes of image, video and speech data. Such systems make machines able to “see,” meaning that not only can they recognize patterns, faces or actions but they can also interpret them and then react appropriately. Schmid will explain how such AI systems learn and how they store their knowledge, and show how diverse their applications are. Human-like processing by AI can be used for purposes such as automated subtitling of video and is enabling increasingly better interaction between robots and humans.
On the day after the lecture, October 23, 2024, Schmid will hold a seminar for KIT students, where she will also discuss her current research. The subject will be “Multimodales Schlussfolgern zum Verstehen von Video-Bilddatenströmen und Generierung von 3D-Szenen” (using multimodal reasoning to understand video data streams and generate 3D scenes).
About the Heinrich Hertz Guest Professorship
With the annually awarded Heinrich Hertz Guest Professorship, KFG and KIT honor prominent figures from academia, industry, government or the arts for their scientific and cultural achievements and contributions. KFG, which promotes research, teaching, innovation and academic life at KIT, founded the guest professorship in 1987 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the experimental proof of electromagnetic waves by the physicist Heinrich Hertz at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, one of KIT’s predecessor institutions.
About Cordelia Schmid
Dr. Cordelia Schmid, born in 1967, is a German computer scientist and expert on artificial intelligence. Schmid has been with the French research institute INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) in Grenoble since 1997 and has been a research director there since 2004. She has also headed a research project at Google Research since 2018. Schmid has been honored with numerous prizes for her fundamental contributions to AI-based image processing, most recently the Körber European Science Prize in 2023 and the 2024 European Inventor Award in the research category. Schmid is a KIT alumna; she studied computer science at the former University of Karlsruhe from 1987 to 1992. She earned her doctorate from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in France in 1996 and received her “habilitation” there in 2001. (uha)
Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 10,000 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,800 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.
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