The German Research Foundation (DFG) has established five new research groups, one of which is led by Leibniz University Hannover (LUH). The new groups have been granted a total of 19 million euros. The research group at LUH is located at the Institute of Automatic Control and is titled “Active Learning for Dynamic Systems and Control – Data Informativeness, Insecurity and Guarantees”. It focuses on machine learning in dynamic systems. In addition to Leibniz University Hannover, the University of Freiburg and the technical universities of Hamburg, Ilmenau and München are participants in the cooperative project.
From autonomous driving to medical diagnoses, machine learning is applied in many areas of everyday life. However, additional challenges arise in practice – for example, with regard to security guarantees for autonomous driving or interactions between humans and machines. “This type of guarantee is generally not available with conventional machine learning processes, which means that new methods are required,” said Prof. Dr.-Ing Matthias Müller, head of the Institute of Automatic Control at Leibniz University Hannover and spokesperson for the research group. The group therefore aims to develop fundamentally new active-learning approaches in which the learning process is continually being influenced. “These types of active learning strategies are necessary to guarantee the safe, high-performance and data-efficient operation of complex and dynamic systems,” said Müller. The research group is investigating what, when and how the system needs to learn actively. Its findings could be applied in robotics and power engineering.
DFG research groups enable researchers to study current and pressing questions in their subject area and to establish innovative lines of enquiry. They are funded for an initial period of four years, with the possibility of an additional two-year funding period.
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For further information, please contact Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Müller, Institute of Automatic Control and research group spokesperson (tel. +49 0511 762 4523, email: mueller@irt.uni-hannover.de).
