Beijing, China – Bosch and Tsinghua University announced a five-year cooperation in the area of artificial intelligence centering on the establishment of the Tsinghua-Bosch Joint Research Center on Machine Learning.

　　“The collaboration with Tsinghua University marks another milestone in Bosch’s efforts to support pioneering technologies in the dynamic AI field and accelerate the deployment of AI in real-world industrial applications,” says Prof. Thomas Kropf, President of Robert Bosch Corporate Research. “Bosch believes AI can only be effectively driven with the involvement of the larger scientific community and therefore needs to build alliances from universities and associates around the world to achieve significant progress. The collaboration between Tsinghua University and Bosch will offer great potential for synergies for both partners.”

Bosch invests 50 million RMB to jointly conduct significant research in Industrial AI

　　Bosch is investing 50 million RMB (around 6 million EUR) in this partnership with Tsinghua geared towards driving advanced research and development work in the field of industrial artificial intelligence. Both partners will direct their efforts towards joint projects in machine-learning, an area vital to industrial AI development and application. The collaboration will encompass fundamental theoretical research, advances of a probabilistic programming platform, and the development of AI applications for intelligent manufacturing. In addition, Bosch will set up a 5-million-RMB (around 0.6 million EUR) Bosch AI Professor Fund to sponsor the research activities of professors at the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University.

　　Yong Qiu, President of Tsinghua University, expressed thanks in his speech for Bosch’s continued support of Tsinghua: “I’m delighted to see that today we will sign two important agreements. This is the first online signing ceremony for a collaboration agreement in the history of Tsinghua. We are now in the golden age of artificial intelligence development. Machine-learning is an important factor to promote the development of AI in many fields, such as image, voice and machine translation. Although great progress has been made in machine-learning in recent years, challenges still lay ahead. These challenges require close cooperation between academia and industry. And our new collaboration aims to achieve innovations in terms of basic theories and key breakthrough technologies in machine learning. I sincerely wish and strongly believe that our close collaboration will lead to outcomes that can shape the future of humankind.”

　　AI is the key technology of Bosch. By 2025, the aim is for all Bosch products to either contain AI or have been developed or manufactured with its help. “Our research and development activities are all geared toward the goal of becoming one of the global leaders in AI innovation,” says Thomas Kropf.

Currently, Bosch operates seven AI centers worldwide, in Germany, U.S, India, Israel and China, with more than 160 projects now underway in the domains of mobility, manufacturing, agriculture, and smart homes. At Bosch, a total of 1,000 associates are working on AI. To drive progress, Bosch also has built alliances with key players in both the industry and the academia across the world to address key challenges in AI and machine learning.

　　In the U.S., Bosch is working closely with Carnegie Mellon University and investing 8 million dollars on AI research. Significantly, as a founding member of Cyber Valley, Bosch is investing 100 million euros in the Bosch AI Campus in Tübingen, where some 700 experts will be working on applied AI starting from the end of 2022. Equally important, Bosch continues to invest in human intelligence. Over the next two years, Bosch will make 20,000 associates, including managers, engineers and AI developers, ready for AI. The newly released Bosch AI code of ethics is also a part of the training, as a clear guideline for Bosch associates when developing safe, robust and explainable AI products.

　　Tsinghua University’s AI research boasts a solid foundation and occupies a leading position both at home and abroad, and has made many achievements in areas such as machine learning, information retrieval and natural language processing. As shown by the official CS Rankings, Tsinghua ranks second in terms of the number of high-level papers published in the field of AI among institutions and universities around the world.