Call for Participation

COVID-19 Statement

We would first like to express our empathy and condolences with those affected by COVID-19 so far, and those who will have a difficult 2020.

The Summer School Organization Committee is monitoring the situation surrounding COVID-19 and considering what impact this may have on our event. Our plan to manage potential travel restrictions is as follows:

• The summer school will take place in late July in France, when a strong improvement in the situation related to Covid-19 is foreseen.
• However, in case some countries still have restrictions on travelling, we will propose an innovative on-line/off-line participation allowing participants to remotely attend the keynotes and courses, and to realise the practical exercises by accessing services that are deployed in factories running in three sites (Nuremberg, Saint-Étienne, St Gallen). Students will participate to the deployment of distributed and decentralized connected Industry 4.0

Context and Motivation

The current process of digitization undertaken in all parts of society, business and technology is transforming industry in all its facets and processes. Data, smart services, Internet of Things, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence are changing the way humans and companies work together. There is a strong reshaping of Industry going on.
In this strongly dynamic context, the current data revolution and increasing automation of cognitive tasks are raising challenging issues related to:

• interoperability of data, things and services in the increasingly open and geographically distributed industrial ecosystems;
• efficient processing of the big amount of data generated by distributed production and business processes supported by IoT;
• consistent and coordinated autonomous decisions and activities undertaken by fine-grained (machines, robots, humans) to coarse-grained (workshops, enterprises) entities in decentralized and open ecosystems.

In order to build a trustful intelligent open infrastructure to support this industry of the future, it is important to enhance the set of methods and to increase research in the domain of Artificial Intelligence on the one hand, and to foster education, development and cross-fertilization efforts with the actors of Industry 4.0 on the other hand.
Artificial Intelligence technologies pertaining to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Autonomous Agents and Decentralized Artificial Intelligence, Responsible Artificial Intelligence are interesting candidates to tackle the challenging issues of Industry 4.0.
In that direction, it is of first importance to share experiences and expertise between academia and industrial partners from France, Germany as well as other European countries with regard to Industry of the Future and AI.

Goal of the Summer School

This Summer School aims at investigating how Artificial Intelligence technologies can tackle the challenging issues of the industry of the future with respect to interoperability, data processing and autonomy, thus contributing to a trustful and responsible intelligent infrastructure. The key objective is to prototype and review solution approaches to actual problems.
The goal is to gather young talents and train them on common theoretical and practical basis by experts from industry and academia, inspired by the visions and the experience of keynote speakers. Participants will also work towards executable proof-of-concept solutions addressing requirements stemming from the industry and building on cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents, Linked Data and Big Data Technology. The main topics of the Summer school will be on the Web of Things, Knowledge Graphs, Decentralised AI, and Responsible AI.

Potential Interest

Participants will benefit from a motivating environment where:

• This event is closely aligned with the cutting-edge R&D activities.
• Excellent young talents draft innovative proof-of-concept solutions to actual problems.
• A reality check by expert reviewers confirms the further viability of the initial solutions.
• The events provide their participants with a network of business/project partners for subsequent experimentation and implementation;
• An unique opportunity to share experiences and expertise between academia and industrial partners from France, Germany as well as other European countries with regard to Industry of the Future and AI.