In addition, GIP celebrated its 25th anniversary this year and invited a very special guest and speaker for the occasion: the Pope of AI, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber. His invention, the LSTM, is now in every smartphone and is used by leading companies, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others. 

In a workshop, together with his host, Dr. Bernd Reifenhäuser, founder and CEO of GIP, various aspects of current R&D in AI were highlighted. Dr. Reifenhäuser presented to his guests the Quantum Grid out of the Box - The Thinking Grid, which is a self-constructing and self-organizing power grid especially suitable for countries with weak infrastructure such as Rwanda. Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber followed with a presentation of Deep Learning and LSTM followed by a get-together where the guests could ask many interesting questions. 

Dr. Alexander Ebbes opened the series of lectures. He showed the visionary projects of GIP around the topic of AI. He opened up a world of intelligent networking to his guests, with communication networks as AI-based SDN. He took a special look at GIP's main product, the Xyna Factory, a model-based automation platform that will execute processes such as visual engineering with the use of AI in the future. 

Prof. Dr. Schmidhuber drew a vision of how AIs will not only enrich our everyday lives in the future, but how they will start to act and decide completely autonomously, indifferent to humans. 

Prof. Dr. Petra Gehring, Professor of Philosophy, whose area of expertise is precisely the influence of digitalization on humans, the "mechanization of society", showed that this could or will not only have positive effects. The round of presentations was concluded by Dr. Reifenhäuser, who drew attention to the fact that artificial intelligence first requires intelligent input (i.e.: data). In keeping with the company's name, GIP AG Gesellschaft für Industriephysik, he showed from a physics perspective that measurement, data acquisition and preparation are key strategic factors for successful AI. He elaborated that GIP's mission of "Thinking Beyond Computing" will be expanded in the future to include model-based data mining in addition to model-based algorithms. This will become even more important when the easily available data is exhausted. He showed that there are opportunities here for medium-sized German industry to secure strategic positions.

More than 230 professionals from the telecommunications and energy sectors followed the presentations with excitement and discussed gripping questions about the impact of AI on our future lives together with the speakers at the Xyna Party that followed.

From the agenda:

• Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber
  Scientific Director of the Swiss Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence IDSIA
  »Vision of AI«
• Prof. Dr. Petra Gehring
  Chair of Philosophy at the TU Darmstadt
  »Digitale Intelligenz – Viel Licht, viel Schatten«
• Dr. Bernd Reifenhäuser
  President of the GIP Research Institute
  »Can We Copy the Brain«
• Dr. Alexander Ebbes
  CTO of GIP AG & CEO of GIP Exyr GmbH
  »Xyna the AI based SDN«