The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. is with more than 20,000 employees and 2 Billion Euro annual research budget one of the leading organizations for applied research world-wide. The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) is the Fraunhofer Society’s “data institute” and one of the most renowned research institutions in the data science area, with an extremely strong track record in data mining, machine learning, visual analytics, semantic technologies, information retrieval and software engineering.
The research results are documented through a vast number of publications (> 200 publications since 2010) in renowned conferences (e.g. KDD, ICML, ICDM, AAAI, UAI, IJCAI, ECML / PKDD, WWW, CIKM, Coling, IEEE InfoVis, IEEE VAST, ACM GIS) and leading journals (Machine Learning JMLR, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Int J GIScience). IAIS staff is represented in all relevant organizational and editorial boards and program committees of relevant conferences (WWW, ICML, ISWC, ILP, ECML / PKDD, IEEE VIS).
In addition to the strong position in research, IAIS has an outstanding track record in exploitation and transfer of research results. In addition to application-oriented European research projects, this is demonstrated through contractual research performed for customers in telecommunications (Vodafone, Nokia Siemens), financial services and insurance (Allianz, Commerzbank), publishers (Springer, Zeit), retail (Rewe, Douglas) and logistics (Deutsche Post). Through its business consultants networks and CRM database, IAIS has strong ties to all large German companies and a significant share of Germany’s SMEs and startups. IAIS employs 260 scientists, developers, project managers and business consultants. IAIS is a member of BITKOM, which represents Germany’s IT, telecommunication and digital media sectors, of the Networked European Software and Services Initiative (NESSI), and of the Smart Data Innovation Lab, an initiative of IT industry and academia in Germany. IAIS coordinates 24 institutes from various engineering sectors in Fraunhofer’s Big Data Alliance and its vocational training for data scientists. Through its professors, the institute is also closely connected to computer science departments of the University of Bonn and City University London. The Knowledge Discovery Department (KD) at the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS in Sankt Augustin, Germany, is a research group (about 50 scientists) operating in the field of Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Visual Analytics.