On October 29, the kick-off event of the Hightech Agenda Germany took place in Berlin, where the Federal Government launched its new innovation initiative. In his speech, Chancellor Friedrich Merz emphasised the importance of key technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and microelectronics for Germany’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty.
As part of the event, Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl, Director of the L3S Research Center, participated in the AI panel. In his remarks, he highlighted that the race to catch up in AI has already begun. L3S is actively involved in the national AI service centres as well as in the European initiative European Sovereign AI (EU-SAI). Together with partners such as the AI Association of Germany, Merantix Momentum, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Fraunhofer IAIS, and others, L3S is working on the development of a German reasoning model with a European scope.
Another focus is CAIMed – Lower Saxony Center for AI and Causal Methods in Medicine, funded by “zukunft.niedersachsen”. Here, L3S contributes its expertise in AI methods development and collaborates closely with university hospitals and non-university research institutions. The goal is to use AI to make clinical decisions more precise and to enable personalized therapies. Access to high-quality data and powerful computing infrastructure plays a central role in this endeavour.
Through these initiatives, L3S makes a significant contribution to translating the goals of the Hightech Agenda — technological sovereignty, value creation, and innovation leadership — into concrete research and development projects.
