Paderborn University researcher named Lamarr Fellow
Prof. Dr. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, AI researcher and data scientist at Paderborn University, has been awarded the distinction of Lamarr Fellow by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Together with the federal government, the state is providing the Lamarr Institute – launched at its Bonn, Dortmund and Sankt Augustin sites in 2022 – with a total of around 20 million euros per year of funding. With the Lamarr Fellow Network, the state government is supporting the development of this cutting-edge research institute for AI. The first two researchers from North Rhine-Westphalia were appointed as Lamarr Fellows on Friday 24 March.
State Secretary Gonca Türkeli-Dehnert: ‘The future of AI is being researched and shaped for humankind in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Lamarr Fellowship programme is creating synergies between our AI sites and emphasising the leading role played by AI made in NRW’. The fellows, selected by an international panel of experts, are world-renowned in the core field of AI research. The project being undertaken by Ngonga Ngomo, considered by Stanford University to be one of the best AI researchers in the world, focuses on developing explainable and scalable methods for structured data on the web. ‘The WHALE project is developing scalable processes for calculating large-scale embedding for knowledge graphs. This enables explicit and implicit knowledge to be integrated into large linguistic models. This promises smarter linguistic models that are able to better justify their answers’, Ngonga explains.
The researcher’s work focuses on the interface between humans, machines and data. This in particular includes AI methods and data-driven solutions to challenges such as explainable and responsible machine learning. Ngonga heads up numerous national and international research projects, and also presides over the ‘Data Science’ working group at Paderborn University.
Fellows receive up to 600,000 euros of research sponsoring, as well as access to the Lamarr Institute’s structures and opportunities. They also become part of the global Lamarr network.
