A Return to Our Roots: SemanticEdge at the DFKI Symposium
For SemanticEdge, the symposium held by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in honor of Prof. Hans Uszkoreit was a special honor and a return to our roots. As the first corporate spin-off from DFKI, one of the world’s most renowned AI research centers, our technological DNA stems directly from this cutting-edge research. The foundations were laid by the team under the leadership of Hans Uszkoreit, while our own Chief Scientist, Prof. Jörn Kreutel, helped forge them in parallel. The DFKI lab in Berlin, founded by Uszkoreit, served as the nucleus for the expertise that defines SemanticEdge to this day.
The symposium was an impressive “who’s who” of AI research, bridging entire generations of scientists and entrepreneurs. Among the guests and speakers were foundational figures like Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster, the founding director of DFKI, and Prof. Alexander Waibel, a pioneer in speech translation technology. Bridging the gap to the present was Jakob Uszkoreit, co-author of the seminal Google paper, “Attention is All You Need.” This paper defined the Transformer architecture, laying the groundwork for today’s Generative AI revolution and systems like ChatGPT.
The gathering of the German AI scene’s founders, researchers from Google DeepMind, and thought leaders from Europe, China, and the US was more than just a celebration. It was a powerful testament to the vital connection between fundamental research and practical application. This rich heritage is both our foundation and our motivation to continue developing safe and transparent AI systems built on a deep scientific understanding.