A German scientific delegation recently visited Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (E-town) to seek partnerships in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

At a symposium, enterprises from E-town, including BOE and HIT Robot Group, reached cooperation agreements on AI projects with a delegation from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), led by Hans Uszkoreit,

DFKI, a leading German research institute focusing on research and development (R&D) into AI, is among the world's most recognized centers of excellence. In terms of number of employees and volume of external funds, it is the world’s largest AI research center.

DFKI boasts some of the world’s leading professionals, including Wolfgang Wahlster, who is one of the initiators of Industry 4.0 and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's consultant on science and technology.

AI has had a relatively late start in China but enterprises in E-town are seeking cooperation with global AI research institutes to boost industrial upgrading.

Hans Uszkoreit, the leader of the German delegation, is an expert in natural language research and used to work at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, one of the world’s leading AI institutes. Uszkoreit is expected to set up an AI research institute in E-town. A German big data analysis platform will be established at the institute.