Catalonia joins ELLIS, the European network of excellence in research and innovation on Artificial Intelligence

Catalonia has joined the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), a network of excellence in research and innovation on artificial intelligence.

The new Barcelona ELLIS unit will be integrated into a pan-European network that brings together the best AI researchers and investigators in Europe. This confirms the high quality and impact of Catalonia's research in this field.

“ELLIS unit in Barcelona will help consolidate and strengthen the AI ecosystem in Catalonia, placing us firmly on the global map of innovation and excellence in AI”

Gina Tost, Secretary of Digital Policies of the Government of Catalonia

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Implementing the new unit will promote interdisciplinary research in Artificial Intelligence, establishing collaborations between experts from different institutions at the Catalan and European levels. It will also strengthen links with industry and facilitate the recruitment and retention of talent in this field.

With the support of the government and in coordination with the agents of the knowledge system of the country, the ELLIS Barcelona unit is part of the AI Research Alliance (AIRA), which, coordinated by the Computer Vision Center (CVC), is one of the fundamental powers of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of Catalonia (Catalonia.AI). The ELLIS Barcelona unit contributes to the consolidation of Catalonia as a leader in European innovation and technological development.

Gina Tost, Secretary of Digital Policies, and Laia Arnal, General Director of the Transfer and Knowledge Society of the Government of Catalonia, inaugurated the ELLIS Barcelona official launch.

In her speech, the Secretary of Digital Policies, Gina Tost, emphasized that "the implementation of the ELLIS unit in Barcelona marks the beginning of a new era of prosperity: it will help consolidate and strengthen the AI ecosystem in Catalonia, linking it to the pan-European efforts of Ellis and placing us firmly on the global map of innovation and excellence in artificial intelligence". For this reason, added Tost, "we must congratulate ourselves for these successes that we celebrate today, but even more for those that we will celebrate tomorrow, based on the talent that is being formed for the future".

For her part, the Director of Knowledge Transfer and Society, Laia Arnal, defended that "it is crucial for the Catalan research, development and innovation system to be part of cutting-edge knowledge networks such as ELLIS, to become an active and relevant node, and to contribute to and benefit from its relational, agglomerating, influential, knowledge-generating and research and innovation talent attracting power".

The unit will be led by Carme Torras, PhD in Computer Science, mathematician, and National Research Award 2020 recipient, who said that "it is of the utmost importance that researchers, research institutions and public administrations work together to guide the development of this powerful technology in order to solve the major challenges facing humanity". The event was also attended by Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, ELLIS board member and professor at the University of Milan, and Oriol Vinyals, telecommunications engineer and mathematician, AI expert and current vice president of research at Google DeepMind, who co-led the development of Google's Gemini multimodal AI model.

Catalan AI Research Node

ELLIS Barcelona is integrated by 23 researchers from five universities and four research centers of the Catalan Knowledge System: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the Computer Vision Center (CVC), the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI/CSIC-UPC) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS).

The Catalan unit promotes interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research in AI, covering fundamental and applied research in machine learning and related areas such as computer vision, robotics, and natural language processing. The unit's areas of expertise include human-robot interaction, understanding human behavior, safe and reliable AI, bioinformatics, medical imaging, and open innovation.

It also prioritizes maintaining meaningful connections with local and international industries to collaborate in creating AI systems that promote well-being in just, egalitarian, and sustainable societies. Future work includes organizing seminar series with global experts and events to raise the visibility of AI research in Catalonia and the ELLIS program for doctoral and postdoctoral students.

About the Catalonia.AI Strategy

To make Catalonia a pole of innovation, leadership, and attraction for talent and companies in AI, the Catalan Government promoted the Catalonia.AI Strategy in 2020. The creation of the ELLIS Barcelona unit is one of the lines of work of the Artificial Intelligence Research Alliance of Catalonia (AIRA), which, along with the Center of Innovation for Data Tech and Artificial Intelligence (CIDAI), the Observatory of Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (OEIAC) and the AI community of the Digital Catalonia Alliance (DCA-IA), is one of the four pillars of the strategy, specifically dedicated to promoting research in artificial intelligence and attracting and retaining talent in this field.