Bifold – The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data

Tracking Spooky Action at a Distance

The use of AI in classical sciences such as chemistry, physics, or mathematics remains largely uncharted territory. BIFOLD and Google researchers have now successfully developed an algorithm to precisely and efficiently predict the potential energy state of individual molecules using quantum mechanical data. Their findings offer entirely new opportunities for material scientists.

Scheduling Computing Tasks can reduce Emission

To reduce the carbon footprint of cloud computing, researchers from the Berlin Institute for the Foundation of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) investigated the potential of shifting delay-tolerant compute workloads, such as batch processing and machine learning jobs, to times where energy can be expected to be green.

Red fiber glas cables are connected to a hub.

Internet Hypergiants Expand into End-User Networks

BIFOLD Fellow Prof. Dr. Georgios Smaragdakis and his colleagues received the prestigious ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Best Paper Award for their research into the expansion of Hypergiant’s off-nets. They developed a methodology to measure how a few extremely large internet content providers deploy more and more servers in end-user networks over the last years. Their findings indicate changes in the structure of the internet, potentially impacting network end-user experience and neutrality regulations.

Earth with clouded skies and a satellite viewed from space.

Earth Observation data for Climate Change Research

Many environmental reports are based on the analysis of satellite images. BIFOLD researchers are creating AgoraEO, an infrastructure for Earth Observation (EO) data that enables federated analysis across different platforms, making modern EO technology accessible to all scientists and society, thus promoting climate change innovation worldwide.

In Search of Europe’s Scientific Identity

BIFOLD Fellow Prof. Matteo Valleriani uses algorithms to group and analyze digitized data from historical works. The term used to describe this process is computational history. One of the goals of Valleriani’s research is to unlock the mechanisms involved in the homogenization of cosmological knowledge in the context of studies in the history of science.

May 12, 2022

Beyond Explainable AI

May 12, 2022

ICDE 2022 Best Demo Award

A demo paper co-authored by a group of BIFOLD researchers on “Farming Your ML-based Query Optimizer’s Food” presented at the virtual conference ICDE 2022 has won the best demo award. The authors present a framework for efficiently creating training data for optimizers.

May 11, 2022

Uniting the cloud, the edge and the sensors

May 05, 2022

ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight

The paper “Efficient Control Flow in Dataflow Systems: When Ease-of-Use Meets High Performance” of six BIFOLD researchers was honored with a 2021 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlights Award.

April 28, 2022

New professorship for Machine Learning and Communications

March 17, 2022

Art of Entanglement

BIFOLD, together with the Science Gallery at Technische Universität Berlin, has announced a new artist in residence program called “Art of Entanglement”. The goal of the program is to combine artistic and scientific perspectives of artificial intelligence. The program is endowed

February 21, 2022

Function determines Form

An interdisciplinary research group has developed an algorithm which uses AI to implement inverse chemical design and thus generates targeted molecules based on their desired properties.

June
2022

Virtual Event

BIFOLD Colloquium

Gabriele Mencagli, associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy, speaks about the research directions currently followed by the Parallel Programming Models (PPMs) group at the University of Pisa.

June
2022

Virtual Event

BiDEDE-Workshop

Keynote by Prof. Dr. Volker Markl at the international workshop Big Data in Emergent Distributed Environments (BiDEDE 2022): "NebulaStream: Data Management for the Internet of Things".

The summer school focuses on the latest ethical considerations in machine learning and data management by offering lectures and workshops on two main tracks. It is designed for doctoral students of the BMBF‘s network of AI competence centres.

June
2022

Virtual Event

BIFOLD Colloquium

Stratos Idreos is associated professor at Harvard University. He will show early results from a prototype self-designing data system which can take drastically different shapes to optimize for the workload, hardware, and available cloud budget using machine learning and machine knowing.

Mission Statement and Goals

BIFOLD conducts foundational research in big data management and machine learning, as well as their intersection, to educate future talent, and create high-impact knowledge exchange.

The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), has evolved in 2019 from the merger of two national Artificial Intelligence Competence Centers: the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC) and the Berlin Center for Machine Learning (BZML). Embedded in the vibrant Berlin metropolitan area, BIFOLD provides an outstanding scientific environment and numerous collaboration opportunities for national and international researchers. BIFOLD offers a broad range of research topics as well as a platform for interdisciplinary research and knowledge exchange with the sciences and humanities, industry, startups and society.

Data management (DM) and machine learning (ML) are the scientific and technical pillars powering the current wave of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI); it is the efficient processing and intelligent analysis of very large, complex, heterogeneous data that has the potential to revolutionize and substantially improve our lives and societies. BIFOLD conducts scalable yet agile foundational AI research. Furthermore, it addresses the emerging challenges and requirements created by the rapidly growing importance of data management and machine learning in practically all areas, from medicine, industry, natural sciences, humanities, e-commerce, and media, to government and society.