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.

A network for excellence, interdisciplinarity and an ethical approach to AI

The ELLIS Barcelona Unit promotes interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research in artificial intelligence. Its scope of work encompasses fundamental and applied research in machine learning and related fields such as computer vision, robotics and natural language processing. The unit's areas of expertise include human-robot interaction, understanding human behaviour, safe and reliable AI, bioinformatics, medical imaging and open innovation.

The ELLIS Barcelona Unit is composed of 23 researchers of excellence from five universities and four research centres of the Catalan ecosystem in artificial intelligence: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the University of Barcelona (UB), the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), the Computer Vision Centre (CVC), the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI/CSIC-UPC), and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS).

ELLIS Barcelona prioritises the maintenance of meaningful links with local and international industry, collaborating with a shared focus on the creation of AI systems that promote well-being in just, egalitarian and sustainable societies. In the current context of accelerated AI research and deployment, being part of the ELLIS network allows positioning Catalonia as a key node in this field of research and offers a privileged opportunity to advance machine learning in an ethical and beneficial way for humanity. The Barcelona unit is committed to research, innovation and influencing policy making to promote these goals.

The unit is supported by the Government of Catalonia, in coordination with the agents of the country's knowledge system, within the framework of the Artificial Intelligence Strategy of Catalonia (Catalonia.AI), led by the Ministry for Business and Work. The Barcelona Unit is co-directed by Dr Carme Torras, research lecturer at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI/CSIC-UPC), and Dr Dimosthenis Karatzas, associate director of the Computer Vision Centre and lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Catalonia, AI innovation, leadership and talent pole

Catalonia stands out as a pole of innovation in artificial intelligence thanks to its excellent capabilities in this field. According to the 2024 report "Artificial Intelligence in Catalonia", prepared by ACCIÓ in collaboration with the Secretariat for Digital Policies and the CIDAI, it has a scientific and academic community of international prestige, with more than 72 AI-intensive research groups and first-rate scientific infrastructures. In addition, Catalonia is the third region with the highest funding for AI-related projects within the Horizon Europe programme. It also has a powerful ICT sector, with 488 companies specialised in artificial intelligence that generate a turnover of 2,155 million euros and employ 14,525 workers.

With the aim of promoting Catalonia as a pole of innovation, leadership and attraction of talent and companies in the field of AI, the Government of Catalonia promoted the Catalonia.AI Strategy in 2020. The creation of the ELLIS Barcelona Unit has been one of the lines of work of the Artificial Intelligence Research Alliance in Catalonia (AIRA), which is together with the Centre of Innovation for Data Tech and Artificial Intelligence (CIDAI), the Observatory of Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (OEIAC), and the AI Community of the Digital Catalonia Alliance (DCA-IA), one of the four pillars of the Catalonia.AI strategy, specifically dedicated to boosting research in artificial intelligence and in attracting and retaining talent in this field.

Through the ELLIS Barcelona Unit, Catalonia becomes an integral part of the coordinated European ELLIS efforts to establish the best conditions in Europe for conducting AI research, aligned with European values. The ELLIS Unit connects the rich Catalan AI ecosystem with the pan-European ELLIS network, which opens the possibilities for better collaboration and meaningful coordination of actions on a European scale.