The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (German: Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI) is one of the world's largest nonprofit contract research institutes for software technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) methods. DFKI was founded in 1988, and has facilities in the German cities of Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Lübeck, Oldenburg, Osnabrück, Bremen, Darmstadt and Berlin.

DFKI shareholders include Google, Microsoft, SAP and Daimler.^[1] The directors are Antonio Krüger (CEO) and Helmut Ditzer (CFO).

Research

DFKI conducts contract research in virtually all fields of modern AI, including image and pattern recognition, knowledge management, intelligent visualization and simulation, deduction and multi-agent systems, speech- and language technology, intelligent user interfaces, business informatics and robotics. DFKI led the national project Verbmobil, a project with the aim to translate spontaneous speech robustly and bidirectionally for German/English and German/Japanese.

Branches

There are different research departments.^[2]

Kaiserslautern

• Embedded Intelligence (Paul Lukowicz)
• Augmented Vision (Didier Stricker)
• Innovative Factory Systems (Martin Ruskowski)
• Intelligent Networks (Hans Dieter Schotten)
• Smart Data & Knowledge Services (Andreas Dengel)
• Data Science & its Applications (Sebastian Vollmer)

Saarbrücken

• Cognitive Assistants (Antonio Krüger)
• Institute for Information Systems (Peter Loos)
• Agents and Simulated Reality (Philipp Slusallek)
• Multilinguality and Language Technology (Josef van Genabith)
• Smart Service Engineering (Wolfgang Maaß)
• Neuro-Mechanistic Modeling (Verena Wolf)

Bremen

• Robotics Innovation Center (Frank Kirchner)
• Cyber Physical Systems (Rolf Drechsler)

Berlin

• Interactive Textiles (Gesche Joost)
• Intelligent Analytics for Massive Data - Smart Data (Volker Markl)
• Speech and Language Technology (Sebastian Möller)
• Educational Technology Lab (Niels Pinkwart)

Osnabrück

• Plan-Based Robot Control (Joachim Hertzberg)
• Smart Enterprise Engineering (Oliver Thomas)

Oldenburg

• Marine Perception (Oliver Zielinski)
• Interactive Machine Learning (Daniel Sonntag)

Lübeck

• AI in Biomedical Signal Processing (Alfred Mertins)
• AI in Medical Imaging (Heinz Handels)
• Stochastic Relational AI in Healthcare (Ralf Möller)

Darmstadt

• Systems Artificial Intelligence (Kristian Kersting)
• Systems AI for Robot Learning (Jan Peters)
• Systems AI for Decision Support (Carsten Binnig)