Summer school on AI for Industry 4.0

We invite PhD students, academics, and researcher staff from academia and industry to apply to the 2024 Summer School on AI Technologies for Trust, Interoperability, Autonomy and Resilience in Industry 4.0 (henceforth AI4Industry).

The summer school aims to teach the state of the art of the use of AI technologies and models to tackle the challenges of data revolution and to increase automation of cognitive tasks to develop a trustful and resilient Industry 4.0 (or Industry of the Future). The summer school is organized around concrete industry problems structured as use cases. These use cases aim to stimulate the discussion at the academic institutions toward addressing real-world problems and to showcase innovative solutions to industrial partners.

During the summer school, participants attend lectures of AI technologies and carry out practical exercises dedicated to applying these technologies to solve concrete industry problems. The summer school addresses various aspects of AI in Industry with a particular emphasis on:

• Web of Things
• Knowledge Graphs
• Multi-Agent Systems
• Trustworthy and Responsible AI

Half of the summer school is dedicated to practical work (through a hackathon) while the other half is meant to introduce the theoretical foundations underlying the hackathon’s framework.

After the summer school, participants are encouraged to continue their engagement in solving these problems with the support of the organizers and submitting their work to conferences.

The AI4Industry Summer School series website provide more general information of the summer school.

Important Dates

• Application on a rolling basis: until June 15, 2024
• Notification: 2 weeks after application submission
• Summer School: July 22-26, 2024

Target Audience and Eligibility

We welcome applications from PhD students, academics, and researchers from academia and industry that have already some knowledge in at least one of the topics above, who want to broaden their perspective and apply their AI Technologies skills on concrete problems. We also welcome researchers and industry partners who want to get in touch with a new research community and get updated on recent advances in AI technologies.

Application Process

Please apply to the summer school by filling the application form.

You will be required to submit a résumé/CV and a motivation/cover letter. If you need financial support to participate in the summer school, you need to provide a justification for this request in the motivation letter explaining how the summer school will benefit your career.

The candidate will receive a notification by email at most 2 weeks after the application with the assessment result. If the assessment is positive, the candidate will receive further instructions to how to register to the summer school.

IMPORTANT: The sole application submission does not guarantee the participation in the summer school. Accepted candidates have to register and pay the participation fee, if applicable, to confirm the participation.

We limit the number of on site participants both in Saint-Étienne and in São Paulo to 20 people in each location. Online participation is unlimited, as long as applicants meet the eligibility criteria.

Participation Fee

There is NO FEE for Online participation or participation on site in São Paulo (Brazil). For those participating on site in Saint-Étienne (France), the participation fee is 200€. The fee covers:

• Accommodation (6 nights in the Maison des Élèves)
• Lunch, coffee breaks and snacks
• One Group Dinner
• Ticket for local transportation
• Summer school materials, including diploma

Thanks to our sponsors, some partial and full financial support will be awarded. If you need a partial (i.e., registration fee waiver) or full (i.e., travel + registration fee waiver) financial support, please include a justification for this request in the motivation letter together with your application, and we will consider your request in the limit of our budget.

Contact

contact-ai4industry@listes.emse.fr

We invite PhD students, academics, and researcher staff from academia and industry to apply to the 3rd Summer School on AI Technologies for Trust, Interoperability, Autonomy and Resilience in Industry 4.0 (henceforth AI4Industry).

The summer school aims to teach the state of the art of the use of AI technologies and models to tackle the challenges of data revolution and to increase automation of cognitive tasks to develop a trustful and resilient Industry 4.0 (or Industry of the Future). The summer school is organized around concrete industry problems structured as use cases. These use cases aim to stimulate the discussion at the academic institutions toward addressing real-world problems and to showcase innovative solutions to industrial partners.

During the summer school, participants attend lectures of AI technologies and carry out practical exercises dedicated to applying these technologies to solve concrete industry problems. The summer school addresses various aspects of AI in Industry with a particular emphasis on

• Web of Things
• Knowledge Graphs
• Multi-Agent Systems
• Responsible AI

Half of the summer school is dedicated to practical work (through a hackathon) while the other half is meant to introduce the theoretical foundations underlying the hackathon’s framework. The full program include keynote speakers and lectures can be found at https://ai4industry2023.sciencesconf.org/.

After the summer school, participants are encouraged to continue their engagement in solving these problems with the support of the organizers and submitting their work to conferences.

Target Audience and Eligibility

We welcome applications from PhD students, academics, and researchers from academia and industry that have already some knowledge in at least one of the topics above, who want to broaden their perspective and wants have a chance to apply their skills on concrete problems. We also welcome researchers who want to get in touch with a new research community and industry partners who want to get updated on recent advances in AI.

How to apply

To apply, submit a cover letter and a résumé (in a single file) at https://portail.emse.fr/limesurvey2021/index.php/967397?lang=en.

We limit the number of participants on site in Saint-Étienne to 30 people and on site in São Paulo to 28 people. Online participation is unlimited, as long as applicants meet the eligibility criteria (see Target Audience and Eligibility section).

To broaden the reach of the Summer School, we accept the participation on site (Saint-Étienne, France or São Paulo, Brazil) or Online.

Participation Fee

There is NO FEE for Online participation or those participating on site in São Paulo (Brazil). For those participating on site in Saint-Étienne (France), the participation fee is 150€. The fee covers:

• Accommodation
• Lunch, coffee breaks and snacks
• Summer school materials, including diploma

Thanks to our sponsors, some partial and full financial support will be awarded. If you need a partial (i.e., registration fee waiver) or full (i.e., travel + registration fee waiver) financial support, please send us a motivation letter together with your application, and we will consider your request in the limit of our budget.

Deadlines

• Application on a rolling basis: until June 15, 2023
• Notification of acceptance: 2 weeks after submission
• Registration: June 30, 2023
• Summer School: July 24-28, 2023

Organizing Institutions

• Mines Saint-Étienne (France)
• Technische Universität Berlin (Germany)
• Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil)
• Universität St. Gallen (Switzerland)
• Universitatea Politehnica din Bucuresti (Romania)

Sponsors

• T.I.M.E. Association (https://timeassociation.org/)
• ANR (https://anr.fr/)

Past Editions

Further information about past editions of the AI4Industry Summer School can be found at https://ai4industry.wp.imt.fr.

Contact

Main contact: contact-ai4industry@listes.emse.fr

Mahda Noura, Valentin Siegert and Martin Gaedke submitted an agent architecture to a Semantic Web challenge, based on what they learnt during ai4industry 2021. The purpose of this challenge, the All the Agents (ATAC) challenge was to evaluate the state-of-the-art of agent technologies for the Semantic Web. Their paper, “WAT: Autonomous Hypermedia-driven Web Agents for Web of Things Devices“, was reviewed by a jury of five senior scholars on their use of Semantic Web technologies, as well as on the ability of agents to react dynamically to changes and to interact with each other.

Out of six submissions, the jury considered WAT the most advanced submission. WAT uses the JaCaMo multi-agent oriented programming paradigm to integrate Linked-Data-Fu, for crawling RDF statements about the physical world, and the W3C Thing Description standard, to communicate with cyber-physical systems that can act on the physical world.

Congratulations to them!

The proceedings of the ATAC challenge, with all six submissions, have just been published on CEUR-WS.org.

The 2021 edition of the summer school is over. All presentations slides prepared by our keynote speakers and lecturers can be downloaded from the program. Videos will be published soon. Code for the hackathon, along with exercises is hosted on Gitlab.

We’ve had 62 participants from 7 countries. Most of the participants attended online. Many online participants appreciated the possibility of joining remotely. We hope to increase on-site participation next year, though; thanks to our sponsors (DFH-UFA and the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future), we could fund the stay of the majority of participants.

16 participants filled out our feedback questionnaire. Keynotes were particularly well received. Participants had more prior knowledge on Knowledge Graphs than on the Web of Things and Multi-Agent Systems, but the Knowledge Graphs lecture was highly appreciated.

We’ve got several suggestions for next year. Keynotes will be given after the lectures so that attendees have sufficient background on advanced keynote topics. In addition, because of the significant leap forward between the Knowledge Graphs lecture and the Multi-Agent Systems lecture, we will switch the two and introduce agent programming first, so that participants access the hackathon’s knowledge graph using an agent programming environment.

To finish, the summer school met expectations for 87% of the respondents and 80% would recommend it.

Registration for the ai4industry summer school is now open: https://ai4industry2021.sciencesconf.org/registration.

Online participation is free. Participation on site is also possible, including accommodation and lunch (registration fee: 150€).

The platform will remain open until Monday, July 12th, noon (12pm CEST).

Some more information:

• Connection details for online participation will be sent a few days before the event.
• The location in Saint-Étienne is Espace Fauriel. Accommodation will be at a nearby student dorm. It’s all easily accessible by public transport.
• The location in Waischenfeld is Fraunhofer Forschungscampus. The campus includes a restaurant and bedrooms. Waischenfeld being a rather small town, a bus will be organized to travel from Nuremberg to Waischenfeld (more info to come after registration).
• The location in St. Gallen is the university campus. There’s currently no external participant in St. Gallen but if needs be, hotel rooms can be booked.

More information needed? Use contact-ai4industry@listes.emse.fr.

The organizing committee of the ai4industry summer school has come back together to prepare the 2021 edition!

We are excited to welcome Universität St-Gallen (Chair for Interactions- and Communications-based Systems) and TU Munich (Institute of Automation and Information Systems), alongside Mines St-Étienne, Université Jean Monnet and FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg as organizers.