News

The Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert, will succeed Jan Wörner, who has led the German National Academy of Science and Engineering acatech for four years, on July 1, 2025. She will take over from Co-President Thomas Weber.

Worldwide, we are currently experiencing a phase of massive investments in artificial intelligence: The United States are forging ahead with its 500 billion dollar “Stargate” program and China has presented “DeepSeek”, a model that can possibly be trained much faster and more efficiently than comparable algorithms. More than once in recent weeks, the question has been asked where Germany and Europe stand in this technology, which is immanent for the digital transformation.

We once opened our Twitter channel in order to have a way of reaching our audience from the worlds of research, industry, politics and anyone else interested in innovation with handy information and links to exciting content. This is no longer possible for us. We have therefore decided to leave X and put our energy into other, more rewarding platforms.

The partners of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) project OpenGPT-X have presented the large language model “Teuken-7B”, a powerful, multimedia open-source solution for generative AI applications. Teuken-7B is now available worldwide and provides a promising alternative for scientists and companies looking for commercially viable language models.

Karlheinz Brandenburg turned 70 in June of this year. With his work – and his team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen - he is responsible for one of the greatest research successes in German history: his team developed the mp3 music format, which changed the way music is listened to and distributed forever.

Since June 1, 2024, Professor Sanaz Mostaghim has been the new Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Transportation and Infrastructure Systems IVI. In her position, she works together with the long-standing institute director Professor Matthias Klingner, who will remain in charge until the end of the year.

For our new episode of "Fraunhofer Innovisions: Nachgeforscht" we spoke to Philipp Terhörst. Philipp conducts research into biometrics and facial recognition methods based on artificial intelligence and provides information about facial representations, hard and soft biometric data, their bias and privacy concerns.

The Green ICT Award will be conferred for the second time in 2024 to inspire young researchers for microelectronics and especially for Green ICT. The student award was initiated by the Research Fab Microelectronics Germany, which aims to answer the questions of tomorrow with today's research activities in the field of microelectronics and attaches particular importance to the sustainable promotion of future talents. The prize rewards outstanding student theses in the field of resource-efficient information and communication technology. The winner will receive EUR 2,500 in prize money.

CEPIS DiversIT Charter, together with the German Informatics Society, the Fraunhofer ICT Group, and #SheTransformsIT, are organising a conference to try to find solutions to this lack of meaningful progress in retaining female tech talent. This free one-day conference, titled, ‘Stay in tech! – Policies and practices for attracting and retaining female tech talent’, aims to help companies overcome these challenges and identify ways to retain valuable colleagues.

Today we received the sad news that the former Chairman of the Fraunhofer ICT Group, Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke, passed away on March 21, 2024.