We are delighted to announce that our article “Iterative Oblique Decision Trees Deliver Explainable RL Models” was accepted and is now part of the special issue “Advancements in Reinforcement Learning Algorithms” in the MDPI journal Algorithms (impact factor 2.2, CiteScore 3.7) . Explainability in AI and RL (known as XAI and XRL) becomes increasingly important....
Dataninja Retreat 2021
Between the third and fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were in September 2021 lucky enough to hold in presence the annual retreat of the Dataninja research group, which was at the same time the group's first ever in-person meeting. The rich and balanced program included presentations of the different Dataninja projects by the...
More Transparency in Artificial Intelligence
(Image: Christoph J Kellner) For the research project (RL)^3, which is lead by Laurenz Wiskott (RUB) and Wolfgang Konen (TH Köln) and that is illustrated in the figure above, there is now a press release TH Köln available: https://www.th-koeln.de/hochschule/mehr-transparenz-bei-kuenstlicher-intelligenz_84905.php (sorry, in German only!). (RL)^3 is part of the graduate school Dataninja (Trustworthy AI for Seamless...
Dataninja.nrw Inauguration on May, 3rd, 16:00
We are happy to announce the dataninja.nrw inauguration event that takes place virtually on Monday, May, 3rd, 16-18. Our research group (RL)^3 at TH Köln is part of the AI graduate school dataninja.nrw with a PhD tandem together with Ruhr University Bochum. Please see the attached PDF dataninja_inauguration_05_03 for all the details and the programme of...
Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning at BIOMA'2020
We are happy to announce that the CIOP group of TH Köln participated with two papers and two talks at the 9th International Conference BIOMA'2020 (Bioinspired Optimization Methods and Applications), which took place November 2020, 19th-20th, and was this year a completely online event: "Reinforcement Learning for N-Player Games: The Importance of Final Adaptation" by...
TH Köln takes part in AI Graduate College Data-NInJA
The State of North Rhine-Westphalia provides a grant for the AI Graduate College Data-NInJA („Trustworthy AI for Seamless Problem Solving: Next Generation Intelligence Joins Robust Data Analysis“), coordinated by Prof. Barbara Hammer, University Bielefeld. The grant consists of seven PhD tandems, which were selected out of 37 applications for this grant by an expert jury. TH...
Opitz Reward for Bachelor Thesis about AI and Music
Jordan Scholzen got with his Bachelor's thesis "Künstliche Intelligenz in der Kompositionslehre - Eine Untersuchung von Long-Short-Term-Memory-Netzen zur Analyse von Kontrapunkten nach Fux" the first place in the Opitz-Innovation Reward 2020. The thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Konen, investigates how a supportive AI for music scholars studying composition can look like. Scholzen showed that...
The CO2 costs of video streaming
The Covid-19 crisis pushed many of us to change our working styles. As universities all over Germany changed to an online version, video streaming became a daily necessecity for students to follow the lectures and for professor to be able to evaluate the students' presentations. We hear very often that the stay-home orders amend Covid-19...
First Fully-Online PhD-Colloquium at Leiden University
I am very happy to announce that on Wednesday, April 8th 2020, the PhD-colloquium of Samineh Bagheri, which I had the honor to supervise at TH Köln, successfully took place. Her thesis “Self-Adjusting Surrogate-Assisted Optimization Techniques for Expensive Constrained Black Box Problems” deals with state-of-the art optimization algorithms supported by RBF surrogate models. In normal...
PhD Candidate from CIOP Group Wins Best Paper Award
Electrocardiogram with Anomalies Markus Thill, who is PhD student in our CIOP group, is working on developing new anomaly detection algorithms since 2017 under supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Konen. The field of anomaly detection, which is today often tackled with machine learning algorithms, became a hot topic in the last years. Thill's recent paper titled...