Hvad er et Pionercenter

Description of theme for the Pioneer center initiative: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The ambition behind the Pioneer Center initiative is to establish excellent research units that carry out fundamental research aimed at providing transformative solutions to major societal challenges.

AI has the potential to solve a wide range of societal challenges and will most likely alter parts of our society significantly over the next decades. AI will transform both industries and human lives and interaction, improve health care, reshape the job market, boost growth and environmental sustainability, but also potentially cause challenging transitions, alienation and raise concerns regarding ethics and safeguarding of private data.

Harvesting the full potential of AI is contingent on research within all fields, on procuring knowledge that will encompass the complexity involved in the vast applications of AI.

Examples of research fields that will be of importance for a positive transformation of our society by AI:

• Theoretical foundations of AI
  • Develop novel, efficient, sophisticated, secure, privacy preserving and ethically sustainable algorithms
  • Artificial intelligence in a system’s perspective, learning in interaction with the environment

• High performance computing for AI applications
  • Data availability, causal relations, uncertainties

• Robotics and automatization

• AI for next generation health care
  • Omics technologies, interpretable machine learning, deep learning, precision- and preventive medicine, diagnostics

• AI for energy and climate data analysis
  • Clean energy materials, energy distribution and consumption, sustainable transport
  • Prediction of climate change and necessary interactions

• Human-centered AI
  • Integration of human psychology, ethics, behavior, culture, creativity, democratic institutions, business innovations and other human aspects in the application of AI technology
  • AI in politics, private organizations, and the public sector
  • Crisis response (migrations crisis, natural and man-made disasters, disease outbreak)
  • Language/image processing and AI communication
  • AI and security/privacy
  • AI and the future of work and skills

Description of theme for the Pioneer center initiative: Climate/Energy

The ambition behind the Pioneer Center initiative is to establish excellent research units that carry out fundamental research aimed at providing transformative solutions to major societal challenges.

Our greatest societal challenge is probably that of solving the current impact of energy consumption on the global climate with all the ramifications that has.

Under the Paris Agreement, the world’s countries are committed to cut climate-warming carbon emissions significantly in order to meet the 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal.

The decarbonization challenges are closely connected to all research areas related to the green transition; these include the production, storage and supply of renewable energy and reuse of materials, economic incentives, regulatory instruments, technology push, and human behavior.

Examples of research fields that will be of importance to meet the current goals for carbon emissions:

• Energy storage and transmission
  • New battery and catalysis technologies
  • Synthetic fuels and chemicals
  • Artificial photosynthesis
  • Functional materials with relevance for energy storage and transmission
  • Carbon capture, transportation and storage
  • Reducing the rate of climate change by controlled biological processes

• Sustainable energy production
  • Wind turbines, solar cells, alternative energy production methods
  • Nuclear power, associated safety and responsible waste handling
  • Biofuels and turning waste into fuels
  • Functional materials with relevance for energy production
  • Efficient conversion of alternatively produced energy into electricity

• Energy systems
  • Energy supply, planning, infrastructure, migration and mobility, data management
  • Smart grids
  • Energy market models
  • IT based solutions for optimizing energy systems
  • Innovation and optimization of energy storage and conversion capacity of systems based on water

• Energy and society
  • Mediation of green transition by regulatory instruments and economic incentives
  • Sustainable cities, smart cities
  • Optimizing energy use in food production and industry

Examples of research fields that will be of importance to understand and counteract human-induced climate change:

• Climate in the Arctic and in the oceans
• Effect of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystems
• Predictions of local and global climate in the light of current and future carbon emissions, including the effect of global feedback mechanisms on the world’s climate

Pionercenter for Kunstig Intelligens

Pioneer Center for Landscape Research in Sustainable Agricultural Futures

• Christian S. Jensen, næstformand i Danmarks Grundforskningsfonds bestyrelse – har overtaget rollen som formand for pionercenterstyregruppen, indtil der er fundet en ny formand for DG
• Thomas Bjørnholm, forskningsdirektør i Villum fonden
• Jan Egebjerg, Senior Vice President, Grants & Prizes, forskningsdirektør i Lundbeckfonden
• Lene Oddershede, Senior Vice President i Novo Nordisk Fonden
• Søren-Peter Olesen, direktør for Danmarks Grundforskningsfond
• Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, direktør Carlsbergfondet