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On April 17, 2026, a landmark step for the European AI landscape was taken as part of the “Franco-German Forum on Industrial AI”: The final report of the “French-German AI Industry Executives’ Dialogue” was officially handed over to the relevant ministries of both countries. Thomas Courbe, Director General for Corporate Affairs on the French side, and Dr. Beate Baron, Director General for Industrial Policy at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, accepted the report. The German Fraunhofer Gesellschaft coordinated the initiative together with the French research institutes Inria and Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT), thereby reinforcing its central role as a driving force in the development and industrial application of AI technologies in Europe.

Today, Tuesday, marks the annual presentation of the Fraunhofer ICT Dissertation Award. Once again, the award will recognize outstanding dissertations from member institutes of the Fraunhofer ICT Group that deal with highly innovative developments and technologies in computer science, mathematics, or related fields. The prize is endowed with 5,000 euros, 3,000 euros, and 2,000 euros for the first three places.

With the founding of the Virtual Worlds Association (VWA) last summer, a European alliance for open, beneficial, and human-centered virtual worlds was created. The international non-profit organization brings together leading industrial companies, SMEs, universities, and research institutions to promote technology development in Europe—including immersive technologies, extended reality, digital twins, virtual collaboration spaces, interoperability, and digital skills.

Imagine a city where every rooftop generates electricity, every battery communicates seamlessly with the grid, and algorithms make split-second decisions on how energy is distributed most efficiently. A digital neural system made of data spaces, AI, and cyber resilience that enables net-zero and affordable and secure energy supply – and every citizen and every company will become part of it. The digitalization of energy systems is one of the strategic research and development roadmaps within the Fraunhofer ICT Group. How we aim to lay the digital foundation for the energy networks of the future is explained by Professor Martin Braun.

With the Franco-German AI Executives’ Dialogue, Germany and France are sending a strong signal in support of a sovereign and competitive European ecosystem for artificial intelligence. Fraunhofer is a founding member of the initiative, and the Fraunhofer ICT Group serves as a core partner in organizing the overarching German-French dialogues and industry-specific AI workshops that took place in fall 2025. The initiative kicked off in January 2025 with a plenary dialogue at the French Embassy in Berlin. The focus was on taking stock of the situation: "Where does Europe stand in AI – and what levers must be activated now?"

The Innovation Award, granted by the Academy of Television Arts & Science (ATAS) in North Hollywood, will be presented on October 14, 2025, to Prof. Dr. Siegfried Fößel, Head of the Moving Picture Technologies Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. The award recognizes the development of JPEG XS and the implementation of the video codec in products for forward-looking workflows in the media industry.

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.