The AI Foundation, a leader in creating foundational AI technologies,
products and services to unlock the human potential, as well as Guardian
AI to protect society from its risks, has partnered with the Technical
University of Munich’s Visual Computing Lab, providing resources for
world renowned scientist Professor Matthias Niessner and his team to
continue research in artificial intelligence, deep learning and computer
vision.
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The AI Foundation, headed by CEO Lars Buttler and CTO Rob Meadows, will
utilize research from the lab in their development and engineering of
products for safe and revolutionary AI, as well as create and publish
breakthrough research in the areas of cognitive science, artificial
general intelligence, and human behavior. The company recently announced
that it expanded its world-class team of scientists with the addition of
Joscha Bach, Ph.D., and Delip Rao as vice presidents who will be working
closely with researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
“The authenticity of images and video can no longer be taken at face
value, as artificial intelligence and other technologies allow for
instant generation of complex fakes. As a result of the proliferation of
fakes, human agency and free thinking are at risk,” said AI Foundation
CEO Lars Buttler. “With regards to our current global, socio-political
climate and the heightened risk of manipulation to world democracies,
the AI Foundation is committed to addressing both imminent and distant
future threats. By partnering with TUM, the AI Foundation will continue
to develop products to protect society from the ills of malicious AI,
including deceptive deepfakes and synthetic media.”
The partnership with TUM is part of the AI Foundation’s larger mission,
inviting scientific researchers, media partners, policy-makers, and the
global community to join the company in a collective effort to research,
identify and combat manipulative AI. The company has already begun to
develop a growing community of users reporting suspected fakes and
training AI agents with the development of Reality Defender, a
guardian-AI protecting against fake media including deepfakes. TUM’s
research in advanced AI forensics will enhance the tool’s evolving
capabilities; as synthetic images become more advanced, the Reality
Defender too will advance, growing more capable of detecting new forms
of artificial media.
Professor Matthias Niessner leads the Visual Computing Lab at TUM in
their research of computer vision, graphics, and machine learning,
focused on how these intersect as well as cutting-edge techniques for 3D
reconstruction, semantic 3D scene understanding, video editing, and
AI-driven video synthesis. He has published over 70 academic papers and
has instructed at Stanford University as a visiting assistant professor.
Niessner’s research has received worldwide acclaim and has been featured
in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Spiegel and MIT
Technological Review, among others. He is a TUM-IAS Rudolph Moessbauer
Fellow and has won several awards, including the Google Faculty Award
for Machine Perception, the Nvidia Professor Partnership Award and the
European Research Council Starting Grant’s award of over $1.5M in
research funding.
By developing advanced techniques to modify videos in real time,
researchers have acquired a vital part in understanding manipulated
images and videos. The AI Foundation’s partnership with TUM will
continue to research and reveal how to identify and protect the public
from adversarial fake media.
For more information, please visit AIFoundation.com.
About the AI Foundation
The AI Foundation is dedicated to moving the world forward by giving
each of us our own AI that shares our personal values and goals. The
company has brought together many of the world’s top innovators, AI
scientists, engineers, and investors from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and
Madison Avenue, all united around the idea of making the power of AI
available to all, while protecting us from its dangers. The AI
Foundation’s non-profit entity focuses on tools for detection and
protection, while AI Foundation’s for-profit creates foundational
technologies, products and services to unlock the full human potential.
About the Technical University of Munich
The Technical University of Munich (TUM) is one of Europe’s leading
research universities, with around 550 professors, 41,000 students, and
10,000 academic and non-academic staff. Its focus areas are the
engineering sciences, natural sciences, life sciences and medicine,
combined with economic and social sciences. TUM acts as an
entrepreneurial university that promotes talents and creates value for
society. In that it profits from having strong partners in science and
industry. It is represented worldwide with the TUM Asia campus in
Singapore as well as offices in Beijing, Brussels, Cairo, Mumbai, San
Francisco, and São Paulo. Nobel Prize winners and inventors such as
Rudolf Diesel, Carl von Linde, and Rudolf Mößbauer have done research at
TUM. In 2006 and 2012 it won recognition as a German “Excellence
University.” In international rankings, TUM regularly places among the
best universities in Germany.
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