International research at THI

Research group "Applied intelligent sensors and systems (AISS)" around Brazilian visiting professor Alessandro Zimmer raises third-party funds of more than €1.5 million - A report of the AWARE team

Since the end of 2017, the international research group AISS has been established at the CARISSMA research and test centre under the direction of the Brazilian guest professor Prof. Dr. Alessandro Zimmer. Prof. Zimmer, who initially initiated the AWARE network with the THI at his home university Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), became a visiting professor at the THI in 2017 to establish the competence field Predictive Sensor Systems for Safe Automated Driving at the THI.

In the meantime, Prof. Zimmer, whose main focus is on computer vision, image processing and artificial intelligence, has built up a twelve-member research team from Germany, Portugal, Brazil, UK and India and has published ten scientific papers. Together, the team has so far raised a total research budget of currently €1.5 million, including the recently approved SAVE-ROAD project from the Bavarian Research Foundation with €335,000, which aims to safely predict the severity of traffic accidents using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The industrial partners include Audi, Continental, Airbus, EFS, Silicon Radar, PCO and Expleo. Funding is provided by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the European Union's Horizon 2020 funding programme and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In addition, five new international university partners have been acquired: L'École de technologie supérieure Montréal, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), Universidade de Campinas (Unicamp), Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and Universidade Federal do Maranhão (UFMA).