Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS
Prof. Mario Trapp is Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS. In 2005, he obtained his PhD from TU Kaisers-lautern, where he also did his habilitation in 2016. He also joined Fraunhofer IESE in 2005, where he started off as a head of department in safety-critical software before becoming head of the Embedded Systems division from 2009 to 2017. After being appointed Acting Executive Director of Fraunhofer ESK (now Fraunhofer IKS) in Munich on January 1, 2018, he assumed this role on a permanent basis on May 1, 2019. In addition to this, Mario Trapp has been a Full Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since June 1, 2022. He is the Resident Professor for Engineering Resilient Cognitive Systems at the School of Computation, Information and Technology CIT. Prior to this, he taught as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the TU Kaiserslautern.
For many years, Mario Trapp has been contributing his expertise to the development of innovative embedded systems in the context of successful partner projects, in cooperation with both leading international corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises. Currently, his personal research focus is safety assurance and resilience for cognitive systems, which form the technological basis of many future scenarios such as Industrie 4.0 and automated driving. Mario Trapp has authored numerous international scientific publications. He is also a member of the Bavarian State Government’s Council on AI (Bayerischen KI-Rat) and the Bavarian State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy’s AI — Data Science (KI — Data Science) expert panel.
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Gitta Kutyniok currently has a Bavarian AI Chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and is in addition affiliated with the DLR-German Aerospace Center and the University of Tromso. She received her Diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science as well as her Ph.D. degree from the Universität Paderborn in Germany, and her Habilitation in Mathematics in 2006 at the Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen. From 2001 to 2008 she held visiting positions at several US institutions, including Princeton University, Stanford University, Yale University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Washington University in St. Louis. In 2008, she became a full professor of mathematics at the Universität Osnabrück, and moved to Berlin three years later, where she held an Einstein Chair in the Institute of Mathematics at the Technische Universität Berlin and a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering until 2020. In 2023, together with colleagues she founded the start-up EcoLogic Computing GmbH.
Gitta Kutyniok has received various awards for her research such as an award from the Universität Paderborn in 2003, the Research Prize of the Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen and a Heisenberg-Fellowship in 2006, and the von Kaven Prize by the DFG in 2007. She was invited as the Noether Lecturer at the ÖMG-DMV Congress in 2013, a plenary lecturer at the 8th European Congress of Mathematics (8ECM) in 2021, and the lecturer of the London Mathematical Society (LMS) Invited Lecture Series in 2022. She was also honored by invited lectures at both the International Congress of Mathematicians 2022 (ICM 2022) and the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2023). Moreover, she was elected as a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2017 and of the European Academy of Sciences in 2022, became a SIAM Fellow in 2019 and an IEEE Fellow in 2024, and served as Vice President-at-Large of SIAM from 2021 to 2023. She currently acts as LMU-Director of the Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI (relAI) in Munich. In addition, she is initiator and spokesperson of the DFG-Priority Program "Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning" and of the AI-HUB@LMU, which is the interdisciplinary platform for research, teaching, and transfer in AI at LMU.
Gitta Kutyniok's research work covers, in particular, the areas of applied and computational harmonic analysis, artificial intelligence, compressed sensing, deep learning, imaging sciences, inverse problems, and applications to life sciences, robotics, and telecommunication.
Keynote Title: Trustworthy & Sustainable AI: Powering the Future with Next-Generation Computing
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is transforming industry, society, and science at an unprecedented pace. Yet its future depends on solving two pressing challenges: trustworthiness and sustainability. In this lecture, we will examine these obstacles from a foundational perspective, uncovering their root causes and highlighting the limits of current computing architectures. This perspective points to the need for rethinking hardware design and embracing novel paradigms such as analog computing, paving the way toward AI systems that are not only powerful but also reliable and energy-efficient.