New Service Catalog: SDIL Makes German AI Top Research Available for Companies

The Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL) is now making available for the first time a service catalogue to support companies in the implementation and acceleration of data- and AI-driven projects. Originally founded as a “data cleanroom” for research purposes, the SDIL is expanding its range of services, enabling companies to choose from an extensive catalogue of transfer services to drive their innovations forward. (Source: Jülich Supercomputing Centre – News flashes)

Please note: The text has been translated using a machine translation tool and may contain inaccuracies.

Infrastructure, tools, technologies and processes for successful data- and AI-driven projects: The Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL) is making this transfer service offering available in the form of a service catalogue, making it easier for companies to use. Founded in 2014 as a “data cleanroom” for research on industrial data, the SDIL is now for the first time offering its services directly to interested companies as part of the Smart Data Innovation Services (SDI-S). From now on, these companies can select from a catalogue of transfer services around current AI methods and infrastructure to drive their own innovations more quickly. They benefit from the expertise of all partners combined in the SDIL, which offer the “Innovation Services”: On the research side, these are the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as coordinator, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and the Forschungszentrum Jülich; on the industry side, IBM, SAP and Software AG as providers and – as a new direct partner – Sicos BW GmbH as a link between research and industry.

“Our goal is to bring German AI top-level research directly to companies,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Beigl, spokesperson for SDIL and head of TECO at KIT. He continues: “The services provided uniformly by the SDIL are important to facilitate technology transfer and to simplify access for companies to the concentrated AI competence of several research institutions.” The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is supporting the setup of the transfer service catalogue and the testing of these services during the setup phase from 2023 to 2024, not least for this reason.

Project tender enables free access to AI infrastructure and AI competence

As part of a total of three project calls, companies with innovative AI project ideas can apply. The requirement for application is that they can profitably exploit the offered “Innovation Services” – in the areas of large language models, image recognition, embedded and data-efficient AI – in their own products or processes. The deadline for the current call for applications is September 20, 2023. An overview of the offer and further application modalities can be found on the SDIL call page at “www.sdil.de/services/“. The selected flagship projects can (funded by the BMBF) use transfer services worth up to 50,000 EUR or a maximum of six person-months per micro-project. In addition, they can use a maximum of 10,000 GPU hours on a high-performance GPU cluster and the latest cloud offerings from the industry partners IBM, SAP and Software AG.

The currently launched projects of the first call for applications, for example, support the work of the KIT for Aleph Alpha GmbH to ensure truth in large language models. Another example is provided by a group of founders who, with the help of the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the provided AI accelerators and cloud systems, want to improve the detection of grape leaf diseases. A complete list of examples can be found on the project website, which shows more than 70 successful examples of AI collaborations between research and industry at SDIL. The third call for applications will start in early 2024.

Smart Data Innovation Day in November

Even apart from the current calls for applications, the SDIL offers access to experts and domain-specific skills as well as exchange between AI competence centers. This year’s Smart Data Innovation Day will take place on November 16 in St. Augustin, together with the North Rhine-Westphalian AI Service Center West-AI. Here, interested companies can inform themselves about project results and current developments. More information will follow shortly on the SDIL news page.

About the SDIL:

The Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL) is an exchange and operating platform to accelerate cooperation between industry, public sector and research in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Smart Data technologies. The concept for the SDIL was developed in the working group “Education and Research for the Digital Future” of the National IT Summit of the Federal Government in 2014. The SDIL provides modern analysis functions to collaborative research projects, with which data stocks from companies (real data sources) and from publicly available data sources can be evaluated.

The further development and use of the SDIL has been supported since 2015 within several research projects (SDI-X, SDI-C, SDI-S) by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The SDIL’s offering is also supported in the network of European Data Innovation Spaces within the H2020 programme of the EU within the framework of the EUHubs4Data project. In addition, the participating partners, especially industry, contribute to the SDIL with their own resources (hardware, software, personnel).

Currently (2023-2024), the BMBF is funding the expansion of the “Smart Data Innovation Services” offering in the funding phase with approximately one million euros per year. Support is received on the research side: the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS; additional partners are the technology transfer company Sicos BW and the three IT companies IBM, SAP and Software AG; the latter are particularly involved with their cloud offerings. www.sdil.de

About the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)

The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) operates one of the most powerful supercomputing infrastructures in Europe and makes it available to researchers at the research centre and throughout Europe for research purposes. As part of this task, the JSC also carries out research and development tasks in the areas of computer architecture, data communication, operating systems for high-performance systems, distributed data management, algorithm development, performance analysis, programming techniques and computational science.

Within the SDI-S project, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre offers specific services for domain-specific data science approaches in remote sensing and health care. In addition, the JSC will also provide generally applicable services such as hyperparameter optimization and the acceleration of model training with distributed deep learning.

The original press release can be found at: 

Neuer Service-Katalog: SDIL macht deutsche KI-Spitzenforschung für Unternehmen verfügbar (only in german)

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Wissenstransfer: Neuer Service-Katalog macht deutsche KI-Spitzenforschung für Unternehmen verfügbar (only in german)

Localization in the Helmholtz Research Field Information:

Helmholtz Research Field Information, Program 1: Engineering Digital Futures, Topic 1: Enabling Computational- & Data-Intensive Science and Engineering

Contact for SDIL at JSC:

Dr.-Ing Chadi Barakat
Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS)
Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)
Forschungszentrum Jülich
Phone: +49 2461/61-96558
E-Mail: c.barakat@fz-juelich.de