Artificial intelligence is often still viewed with skepticism, and in the social debate it is quickly associated with robots that replace jobs. But this view is richly one-sided, according to Prof. Dr. Thomas Stumpp, Vice President of Business at HM: "Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to positively shape the economy and society. Used correctly, we can all benefit from artificial intelligence systems."
"With this project, we want to increase the number of startups in the field of artificial intelligence in the Munich Metropolitan Region by initiating entrepreneurial projects and scouting existing projects and startups and supporting them on their way to the market," explains Prof. Dr. Klaus Sailer, Managing Director of SCE, the Entrepreneurship Center at Munich University of Applied Sciences. In doing so, it is important for the model project partners to shed light on the benefits of AI innovations for society as a whole.
"Startups are already using AI to solve societal problems. For example, with the help of artificial intelligence, forests can be monitored from space to enable timely intervention in the event of forest fires. AI can also be used to calculate the CO? sequestration potential of a forest on the basis of aerial photo data, so that it can then be managed more sustainably," says Dr. Sebastian Planck of MUC.DAI, the interdisciplinary center for digitization and artificial intelligence at HM, describing two of many examples in which artificial intelligence brings added value for society as a whole. For the model project, the task now is to develop and scale existing AI startup ideas and to increase the research transfer of students and doctoral students at Munich University of Applied Sciences and the Technical University of Munich who are interested in founding a company. So that Artificial Intelligence is shaped and understood as a technology, the societal challenges are met with positive impact and thus the reservations towards it are transformed into potentials.
AI+Munich is a project of the EXIST "Start-ups from Science" funding program of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (BMWi), which announced in mid-2021 that it would promote start-ups in the field of AI in order to strengthen "not only concrete start-ups, but above all the networking of universities and research institutions with existing AI companies and the economy as a whole in selected regions." To this end, the BMWi is now funding "one model project each in four important German AI regions - Hamburg, Munich, Darmstadt and Berlin - which will be financed through the BMWi's EXIST program. For the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, AI is the decisive key technology of the coming decades, which will have an impact on many policy areas," according to the BMWi announcement.