Our official opening took place on February 11, 2020 from 6:00 p.m. on the 6th floor of Dockland (Van-der-Smissen-Straße 9, 22767 Hamburg). In stormy weather, floods and hail, more than 160 participants found their way to Dockland and were welcomed there by our ARIC board member, Mr. Nick Gehrke, as host and professor at the Nordakademie.
After the greetings from the guests of honor Senator Michael Westhagemann, President of the Authority for Economics, Transport and Innovation, and Mr. Ralf Sommer, Board Member of IFB Hamburg, Jan Schnedler, from the management of ARIC, and Dr. Lothar Hotz, board member of ARIC, received the funding decision from the city of Hamburg amounting to 400,000 euros for the current year. Senator Westhagemann was particularly pleased about the energetic and diverse AI community that has already formed in ARIC within the last few months after the association was founded. The topic of AI is in the best of hands with ARIC and is now finally bundled and promoted in the metropolitan region of Hamburg by ARIC. This is of great importance to the location.
Then the co-founder and managing director Alois Krtil presented the ARIC and its areas of activity. Our partners and members presented their first AI projects from the areas of FinTech (Euler Hermes), media (Pilot Hamburg) and aviation (Lufthansa Industry Solutions), which have already been initiated together with the ARIC. This gave the audience exciting impulses for the festive part of the evening that followed.
We are pleased that we were able to use this occasion again to thank our previous companions and supporters and to celebrate the starting shot for a productive, interdisciplinary and fruitful cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence together with members, partners and other interested parties.
In addition, exemplary practice-relevant applications and demonstrators from the field of AI were set up in the premises of Dockland, which made the topic tangible and tangible in a clear way. So the guests were able to deal with applied AI themselves and try out and discuss the tools.
With lounge music composed by AI and good food and drink, we were able to end the evening with stimulating discussions in the AI community.
Graphics © Mathias Weitbrecht, Visual Facilitators
