KION Supports the New Endowed Professorship for Safe Autonomous Systems

“My research centers on the optimization and control of complex dynamic systems, including ones related to energy-efficient vehicles and industrial processes. My team and I would like to further develop these topics at TU Dortmund University in the future, using above all machine learning methods and artificial intelligence and taking into consideration the central question of how to guarantee efficient and safe performance simultaneously,” said Professor Sebastian Peitz when handed his certificate of appointment by Professor Manfred Bayer, President of TU Dortmund University, on 12 September. The new professorship focuses on autonomous systems – such as self-driving cars or fully automated industrial processes – with concrete applications in logistics. This is because robotic systems will have to operate with a high level of autonomy in the future and interact with the human workforce at the same time. In teaching, Professor Peitz, together with the whole team in the department, will train students and doctoral candidates to become specialists capable of developing future-proof and reliable autonomous logistics robots or production systems for industry.

Professor Sebastian Peitz is bringing an ERC Starting Grant with him to Dortmund

Professor Sebastian Peitz is coming to Dortmund from Paderborn University, where he has been junior professor for “Data Science for Engineering” since 2021. Peitz has extensive experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning and dynamic systems and has already worked in mechanical engineering, mathematics and computer science. After completing his doctoral degree in 2017, he initially worked at Paderborn University as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Industrial Mathematics (IFIM) before moving to the Institute of Computer Science as a junior professor in 2021, where from 2022 onwards he also headed an AI junior research group working on the development of multi-criteria training algorithms for deep learning, which was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). At the beginning of September, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded him one of its coveted ERC Starting Grants: His research project on safe and data-efficient reinforcement learning for complex technical systems was selected from the around 3,000 proposals submitted. The European Research Council will fund the project with around €1.5m over five years from 2025 onwards.

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