Talk Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl "Advancing Personalized Medicine through Artificial Intelligence"
Abstract:
The L3S Research Center is the biggest AI Center in Northern Germany, with a variety of foundational AI research as well as application oriented research supporting innovation through AI in many areas, from production through mobility to medicine. In this presentation, I will first give a short overview over L3S research and then focus on how we aim to advance personalized medicine through Artificial Intelligence through the state-funded CAIMed initiative. Strong collaboration between AI and medical research is a cornerstone of this initiative, with the biggest cluster of Long-Covid third-party funded research projects in Germany as our first exemplary example, acquired in the first year of our CAIMed initiative. As second important area I will discuss the use of foundation models for medicine, including both large language models as well as biological foundation models, which are trained on biological data such as single-cell RNA gene expression information.
Bio: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl has held the position of full professor of computer science at Leibniz Universität Hannover since 1995. Prior to this, he was associate professor at RWTH Aachen University from 1992 to 1995, and he completed his studies in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology. He has also worked as a visiting researcher and professor at institutions such as Xerox PARC, Stanford University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EPFL Lausanne, PUC Rio, Università di Trento and Politecnico di Milano, and is currently collaborating with colleagues at Sapienza Università di Roma and Università di Pavia as part of his sabbatical. Prof. Nejdl leads the L3S Research Center, www.L3S.de, and the Data Science Institute at Leibniz Universität Hannover, and does research in the areas of information retrieval, artificial intelligence, social and semantic web, digital libraries, and technology-enhanced learning. Between 2014 and 2019, he was Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant ALEXANDRIA, focusing on foundational research on temporal search, exploration, and analytics within web archives. Recent projects include NoBIAS, Cleopatra, and KnowGraphs (three European graduate colleges), SoBigData++ (EU), the International Leibniz Future Lab on Artificial Intelligence (BMBF), which emphasized AI and personalized medicine, and DAISEC, a European Digital Innovation Hub aimed at fostering innovation through AI and cybersecurity, particularly in production, mobility, and crafts. Since 2023, he has served as Principal Investigator and Speaker of the newly established Center for Artificial Intelligence and Causal Methods in Medicine, connecting universities and research organizations in Hannover, Göttingen and Braunschweig. Prof. Nejdl has authored over 460 scientific papers as recorded in DBLP and has an h-index of 79 according to Google Scholar.