Presentation of the new ELLIS Barcelona Unit

The ELLIS Barcelona Unit, key to consolidating Catalonia's position as a benchmark in AI research and innovation at European level, was presented today at an event held at the Institute for Catalan Studies. Integrated in the network of 43 local units of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), the new unit brings together 23 researchers of excellence in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) from 9 Catalan research institutions and will help to attract talent and foster the economic and technological development of Catalonia.

The official presentation was inaugurated by the Secretary of Digital Policies, Gina Tost y Faus, and the Director General of Knowledge Society, Transfer and Territory, Laia Arnal y Arasa.

Among the future lines of work of the Catalan unit are the organisation of cycles of seminars with international experts, events to give visibility to AI research carried out in Catalonia and the ELLIS programme for doctoral and postdoctoral students. In addition, the event was attended by ELLIS board member and professor at the University of Milan, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, and telecommunications engineer and mathematician, AI expert and current vice president of research at Google DeepMind, Oriol Vinyals, who co-led the development of Google's multimodal AI model, Gemini.

The ELLIS Barcelona Unit responds to the need to promote interdisciplinary research in AI, set up collaborations between experts from different institutions both at Catalan and European level, maintain links with the industry, and facilitate the recruitment and retention of talent in this field. With the support of the Government of Catalonia and in coordination with the agents of the knowledge system of the country, the ELLIS Barcelona Unit contributes within the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of Catalonia (Catalonia.AI) to consolidate the region as a leader in innovation and technological development in Europe.

The Catalan unit provides the European network with pioneering contributions in autonomous driving, such as the CARLA simulator and imitation learning techniques that enable learning and evaluating driving models in a safe and reliable context; unique expertise in assistive robotics and cutting-edge technology for versatile tissue manipulation; crucial contributions in multimodal learning systems, including methods that enable machines to understand written information through vision and generate synthetic data; and numerous other areas of expertise covering healthcare, interactive learning, interactive learning and interactive learning; crucial contributions in multimodal learning systems, including methods that enable machines to understand written information through vision and generate synthetic data; and numerous other areas of expertise covering healthcare, interactive learning, lifelong learning, natural language processing, AI for education and trustworthy AI.