KION endowed professorship for Safe Autonomous Systems filled

Autonomous systems are increasingly being used in logistics and industrial production. The newly established KION endowed professorship at the Department of Computer Science will research how they can be designed to be reliable, robust and safe: Prof. Sebastian Peitz will take over the "Safe Autonomous Systems" department in the winter semester 2024/2025. His professorship will be funded by the KION Group with one million euros for the first five years and then made permanent by the university.

"In my research, I deal with the optimization and control of complex dynamic systems, including in relation to energy-efficient vehicles and industrial processes. Together with my team, I would like to further expand these topics at TU Dortmund University in the future, in particular with the use of machine learning methods and artificial intelligence as well as with a view to the central question of how to guarantee efficient and safe behavior at the same time," emphasized the newly appointed Professor Sebastian Peitz when he received his certificate of appointment from TU Dortmund University Rector Prof. Manfred Bayer on 12 September. His new professorship focuses on the field of autonomous systems - for example self-driving cars or fully automated industrial processes - with specific applications in logistics, where robotic systems will have to operate highly autonomously and interact with human workers at the same time. In teaching, Prof. Peitz and the entire department team will train students and doctoral candidates to become specialists who are able to develop future-proof and trustworthy autonomous logistics robots or production systems for industry.

Prof. Sebastian Peitz brings ERC Starting Grant to Dortmund

Professor Sebastian Peitz is moving to TU Dortmund University from Paderborn University, where he has held the "Data Science for Engineering" junior professorship since 2021. He has extensive experience in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and dynamic systems and has already worked in the fields of mechanical engineering, mathematics and computer science. After completing his doctorate in 2017, he initially worked at Paderborn University as a postdoc at the Institute of Industrial Mathematics and moved to the Institute of Computer Science as a junior professor in 2021, where he has also headed a BMBF-funded AI junior research group for the development of multi-criteria training algorithms for deep learning since 2022. At the beginning of September, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded him one of the coveted "ERC Starting Grants": his research project on secure and data-efficient reinforcement learning for complex technical systems was selected from around 3,000 ideas submitted. The European Research Council will fund the project from 2025 with around 1.5 million euros over five years.

Attractive research environment

TU Dortmund University offers an excellent environment for the new interdisciplinary professorship: the Department of Computer Science is characterized by a research tradition that profitably brings together knowledge interests and methods from various scientific disciplines. It combines basic and application-oriented research and, as one of the leading departments in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, brings computer science together with logistics, among other things. Together with research networks and cooperation partners within and outside TU Dortmund University, it forms a hotspot for digital and intelligent logistics: these include, for example, the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security of the University Alliance Ruhr, the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML and various partners from industry, including the KION Group. The KION Group is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main and offers products and services for the optimization of material flows and logistics processes in various industries worldwide.

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