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Visit by German AI delegation may spur new strategic collaborations with the institute.
Posted On: October 04, 2019
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Krembil researchers and staff, German AI experts and Judith Gerlach (third from right, first row), the Bavarian Minister of State for Digital Affairs, during the delegation’s visit.
On September 12, Krembil hosted a delegation of artificial intelligence (AI) experts from Germany. The aim of the visit, which was organized by the State of Bavaria Office in Montreal, was to help German and Krembil researchers identify areas of mutual interest for future collaboration.
 
Judith Gerlach, the Bavarian Minister of State for Digital Affairs, led the delegation, which included 20 government, business and research leaders from Bavaria, a state in the southeast of Germany. Bavaria has one of the largest economies in Europe and is home to some of the continent’s top universities, including Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and the Technische Universität München (TUM).
 
Notably, the group included several internationally recognized computational researchers, such as Prof. Dr. Matthias Schubert, the Chair of Database Systems and Data Mining at LMU; and Prof. Dr. Fabian Theis, Chair of Mathematical Models of Biological Systems at TUM and Head of the Helmholtz Institute of Computational Biology.
 
Several Krembil researchers and staff met with and presented their work to the delegation. The presenters included Drs. Mark Reed (Staff Scientist, Centre for Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery), Frances Skinner (Senior Scientist, brain), Starlee Lively (Scientific Associate, arthritis), Mayuri Gupta (Postdoctoral Fellow, brain) and Jeremy Sivak (Senior Scientist, vision).
 
One promising area of collaboration identified by the group was the application of AI to accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines for chronic diseases.