The new center will coordinate and combine Thuringia’s universities’ research activities in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, and robotics. The Technical University of Ilmenau, the University of Jena, the Institute of Data Science at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Jena, and the Applied Systems Engineering department of the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies, and Image Exploitation IOSB in Ilmenau have joined forces to this end. The necessary funding comes from the state of Thuringia and the Carl Zeiss Foundation , which together are backing the project with €1.4 million. The two universities in Ilmenau and Jena are also helping to finance the center.

As a partner to industry, the TZLR is to carry out joint national and international projects, and thereby strengthen Thuringia’s competitiveness in the development of artificial intelligence. Research into machine learning and data science (i.e. the science of extracting knowledge from data) is, for example, planned. Research will soon be supported by a computer network based on GPUs (graphics processing units).