News

TU Berlin describes how the KIWI Biolab connects mathematical models, laboratory robots and analytical instruments to plan, carry out and evaluate experiments. Its expertise in automation and data handling will also contribute to work at the joint TU Berlin–Charité research center Der Simulierte Mensch (Si-M).

Read the official TU Berlin article

TU Berlin source

The World Bioprocessing Summit Pharma 4.0 will gather world technology leaders from pharma, biotech, and pharma suppliers to share case studies and interactive breakouts towards commercial progress.

We will have the pleasure of showing our state-of-the-art labs to a group of 60 conference attendees.

You can visit the website of the World Bioprocessing Pharma 4.0 Summit here.

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The 14th European Congress of Chemical Engineering and 7th European Congress of Applied Biotechnology is taking place in September 17-21, 2023, in Berlin.

The ECCE 14 & ECAB 7 is organized by DECHEMA e.V. in cooperation with the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) and the European Society of Biochemical Engineering Sciences (ESBES), being the highlight event for the European chemical engineering and biotechnology community.

Nico Cruz, head of the KIWI-biolab, will give a talk on 21.09. within the Digital Transformation section: Realization of automated learning for bioprocess development by integrating robot-driven well-controlled parallel cultures, analytical technologies, and modeling.

Additionally, we have organized a visit to our labs on September 19th for a selected group of the conference participants.

You can visit the ECCE/ECAB 2023 website here.

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Dr. Neubauer is Professor and the head of the Chair of Bioprocess Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. He leads innovative research to identify new methods for more efficient bioprocess development, including genetic, cultivation, and analytical tools, with a particular focus on industrial-scale applications. He also established and heads the KIWI-biolab as an International Future Laboratory for AI for Intelligent Integrated Biolaboratories. Dr. Neubauer’s work orchestrates hardware, software, automation, mathematical models, and AI to discover optimal conditions for PAT end-to-end workflows. Integrating intelligent technologies and automation into PAT solutions is a key factor for moving the pharmaceutical industry toward optimized bioprocesses that improve safety and reduce hands-on intervention.

The Agilent Thought Leader Award will support his ongoing research into understanding and optimizing bioprocesses for difficult-to-express proteins and the development of scale-up/scale-down strategies with in the KIWI-biolab.

You can find additional information in the links below:

• Die TU zum Gewinn des Thought Leader Award von Agilent
• Der Thought Leader Award
• Interview der TU mit Prof. Neubauer
• Interview HealthCapital
• Press release Agilent

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The 33rd edition of the European Symposium on Computer-Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE-33) will take place in Athens on June 18-21, 2023, focusing on green and sustainable process systems engineering in the digital age.

Dr. Nico Cruz, leader of the KIWI-biolab, will hold a talk entitled “Closed-loop optimization of high-throughput robotic platforms for reproducible bioprocess development”. Do not miss it!

You can visit the Symposium website here.

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The KIWI-biolab will be participating in the Long Night of the Sciences!

Drop by the Ackerstrasse 76, 13355 Berlin, we and our selection of experiments will be waiting for you!

More info about the Long Night of the Science in this Link.

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Our KIWI-biolab scientists Mark Dörr, Stefan Maak, Randolf Scholz and Nico Cruz will held different talks in the topics of AI, Machine & Deep Learning, as well as Data Management, Standards & Analytics.

You can have a look to the agenda here. Do not miss it!

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Dr. Annina Kemmer, leader of TF3 at the KIWI-biolab, will give a talk entitled “Development of a modular computational framework tailored to high throughput mini-bioreactor systems”. Do not miss it!

You can visit the Conference website here.

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Info coming soon.

Link

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The Pharma 4.0 Global Bioprocessing Summit & Exhibition will gather world´s technology leaders, scientists, and engineers from pharma, biotech, and pharma suppliers for commercial progress and successful large-scale bioprocessing.

KIWI-biolab project leader, Dr. Nico Cruz, will hold a talk on 10.05.2023.

We will have the pleasure to host a visit from 50 conference attendees to our labs where they will be guided though our state-of-the-art equipment.

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KIWI-biolab scientist Dr. Ing. Marie-Therese Schermeyer presented the KIWI-biolab at the Biotech Days in Karlsruhe.

She shared the goals and advancements of our lab with a presentation entitled “Closed loop bioprocess development”, where she addressed the current challenges in bioprocess development and how AI will help to tackle them.

You can visit the Congress website here.

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For over 20 years, the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo has been the world’s premier event showcasing the technologies and analytic approaches that solve problems, accelerate science, and drive the future of precision medicine. Bio-IT World has united a community of leading life sciences, pharmaceutical, clinical, healthcare, informatics, and technology experts in the fields of biomedical research, drug discovery & development, and healthcare from around the world. The Conference is organized across five in-depth bio-IT focused tracks.

Mark Dörr contributed to the track “Storage Infrastructure & Cloud Computing” though as a panelist on the topic “Making laboratory data actionable and automation flexible using open communication and data standards”.

He presented his insights about “Spotting SiLA and AnIML in the Wild – Open Standards in Robotic High Throughput Screening”.

You can find more information here.

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The 4th Annual SmartLabs Congress its around paving the way to laboratory digitalisation through automation, robotics and cutting-edge informatics tools & technologies. It consists of two days of technical presentations, case studies and knowledge-sharing, including over 30 industry talks, sponsored presentations, think-tank roundtable discussions and complimentary pre-event webinars.

You can visit the Congress website here.

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World Forum for the Process Industries – With manufacturers and service providers from over 50 countries presenting their products for chemical, pharmaceutical and biotech research and manufacturing as well as energy and environmental services ACHEMA is the driving force and groundbreaker for the international process industries and their suppliers.

Various KIWI-biolab scientists will visit the Congress and will held a booth in the Exhibition section – booth A35 at Hall 6.0. Come and meet us!

You can visit the Achema website here.

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The European Robotics Forum 2022 (ERF2022) will be held from 28 – 30 June, 2022, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The ERF2022 covers all aspects and current themes related to the field of robotics. Researchers, engineers, managers, entrepreneurs and public funding officers from all over Europe come together to discuss technology push and market pull and how innovation in robotics and robotics-related AI can be accelerated.

Dr. Nico Cruz will participate in the Workshop in Robotics and AI / Data that will take place on June 28th, from 10:20 to 11:40 CET, under the title: Can a Lab Robot win a Nobel prize? Towards the Nobel Turing Challenge.

The Nobel-Turing Challenge (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41540-021-00189-3) combines the best of AI and robotics to secure the Nobel prize for a robot. The workshop brings together the AI, Robotics and Laboratory community and wider to present some ongoing research that can contribute to this initiative and also discuss the challenges in reaching the goal.

You can visit the ERF 2020 website here

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The 13th Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Process Systems, including Biosystems (DYCOPS) will be held in Busan, Republic of Korea on June 14-17, 2022. The Symposium is organized by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

The IFAC Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Process Systems (DYCOPS) has a long history initiated in 1986 in Bournemouth (UK). The IFAC Symposium on Computer Applications in Biotechnology (CAB) originated from a series of events that started more than 40 years ago in Dijon, France. The overlapping interests in bioprocesses led to the collocation of the two events, and then to their merger into one symposium.

DYCOPS aims to provide a forum for professionals, theorists, researchers, engineers, and students involved in the broad field of process control engineering to integrate and exchange their knowledge, experience, results, and ideas in diverse areas of dynamics and control of process systems, and to explore latest theoretical developments as well as control applications in various industries.

KIWI-biolab visiting scientist, Dr. Jong Woo Kim, and PhD student Judit Aizpuru will present his insights in the Conference. More information will follow soon.

You can visit the DYCOPS website here.

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ESCAPE-32 will take place on June 12-15, 2022, in Toulouse, France.

ESCAPE-32 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) community, and provide a forum to present and evaluate emerging research methods and concepts, and to learn from industrial case studies. ESCAPE-32 would like to focus on the global challenges and interdisciplinary problems related to the current needs of the society and industry: digitalization, sustainability, energy efficiency, water management, safety, health and food, etc.

KIWI-biolab visiting scientist, Prof. Ernesto Martinez, will present his insights in the Conference. More information will follow soon.

You can visit the ESCAPE-32 website here.

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The Future Labs Live 2022 will take place on June 7-8, 2022, in Basel, Switzerland.

KIWI-biolab scientists Dr. Eng. Marie-Therese Schermeyer and Lucas Kaspersetz will be there sharing their views on the use of machine intelligence for lab transformation through two talks entitled:

“Closed Loop Bioprocess Development” M.-Therese Schermeyer et al.
”Across scales: An integrated robotic cultivation platform for accelerated bioprocess development”, Lucas Kaspersetz et al.

You can visit the Future Labs Live website here.

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The BioProcess International Europe 2022 (BPI Europe) conference is hold on May 17-20, 2022, in the Messe Wien Congress Centre (Austria) as an hybrid event.

KIWI-biolab collaborator Annina Kemmer will have a talk entitled “Digital Twins and robotic experimental facilities for bioprocess development”.

Lab automation and computational experimental tools are changing bioprocessing and biopharma. Nevertheless, the biggest hurdles for autonomous development of bioprocesses are still to be tackled. Efficient data management tools, Machine Learning solutions tailored to the characteristics of bioprocesses (dynamics, high complexity, nonlinearity of the system, etc.), process control strategies that exploit parallel cultivations in High Throughput Facilities, and Active Learning algorithms that plan and operate optimal experiments. Annina will discuss the latest advances in this direction and its potential applications.

You can visit the conference website here.

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The 7th BioProScale Symposium 2022 will take place on March 28-31, 2022, in Berlin, Germany.

KIWI-biolab scientists will be there presenting their insights and latest results in high throughput bioprocess development – advances in software, hardware and integration. You can see the KIWI-biolab speakers and the full program here.

You can visit the 7th BioProScale Symposium 2022 website here.

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The ACS Sprint – bonding through chemistray – 2022 will take place on March 20-24, 2022 in San Diego, US.

KIWI-biolab scientist Marie-Therese Schermeyer will present the paper Artificial Intelligence meets Upstream Process Development, in the session for Big Data Science Approaches, Knowledge Management, and Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning Approaches to Synthetic Biology, scheduled on March 23, 2022.

You can visit the conference website here.

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KIWI-biolab colleague Niels Krausch and his former master thesis supervisor Robert Giessmann won the FAIR4Chem Award 2022 for the dataset produced during his master studies:

Collection of UV/Vis spectra acquired while monitoring reaction progress of thymidine phosphorolysis with varying reactant concentrations (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3243352)

The FAIR4Chem Award honours researchers in chemistry who publish their research data. The award is given for published chemistry research datasets that best meet the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and thus make a significant contribution to increasing transparency in research and the reuse of scientific knowledge.

They will present the work at the FJS 2022 on 23-26 March in Hanover Germany during the award ceremony

Please, have a look to the FJS 2022 Hannover here.

More information can be found on linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6894622383211429888/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6894928900921917441/

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The 5th European Conference on Process Analytics and Control Technology will take place online on 15-17 November 2021.

The competitiveness of all processing industries greatly depends on its ability to deliver consistent, high-quality and high-value products at competitive prices, in a sustainable way. Data, Data Analytics and Process Analytical Technology will become the cornerstones for any global, competitive industry, and process analytical techniques are an essential tool in this future.

In this context, the EUROPACT 2021 focusses on featuring innovation along three pillars: Process Analytics in Real-World Manufacturing, From Data to Process Monitoring, Control and Optimization, and Novel PAT and Instrumental Technologies.

Our colleague, Annina Kremmer, is to hold a talk on the subject “Kalman Filter-based soft sensors for biomass, glucose and acetate in parallel Escherichia coli mini-bioreactor fed-batch fermentations”.

Please, visit the EuroPACT 2021 website here.

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Today’s Bioprocessing is the base of several emerging industries and technologies, including the production of therapeutic stem cells, gene therapy vectors, and new vaccines. Advances in Bioprocessing is a particular interest to the industry as it considerably shortens the development timeline, improves the final product and increase the productivity of Bio-manufacturing facilities.

In this context, the event aims to gather world technology leaders from pharma, biotech, and pharma suppliers to share case studies and interactive breakouts towards commercial progress.

We will have the pleasure to host a visit from 60 conference attendees to our labs.

Please, visit the website of the World Bioprocessing Summit here.

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The 20th German Biotechnology Days (DBT) takes place in Stuttgart on September 20 and 21, 2021. The event is considered the German class reunion for biotechnology. At the DBT, entrepreneurs come together with scientists and partners from politics, funding institutions and administration.

In plenary sessions as well as numerous symposia, top-class speakers present and discuss the diverse fields of application and the potential of biotechnology, from health research to bioeconomy, from medicine to industrial production.

Nico Cruz, project leader at the KIWI-biolab, is presenting his insights in the session “Automation: scale-up of the lab”.

You can find additional information here.

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The 13th European Congress of Chemical Engineering and 6th European Congress of Applied Biotechnology is taking place on 20-23 September 2021 in a digital format.

Our colleague Annina Kremmer will present a poster entitled “Kalman Filter-based soft sensors for biomass, glucose and acetate in parallel Escherichia coli mini-bioreactor fed-batch fermentations”.

You can access all the conference information here.

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This week was the first KIWI-biolab experiment in which our MiLA was fully deployed. It transported the samples from Tecan liquid handling station to Roche’s Cedex BioHT. A great milestones for our KIWI-biolab!

Have a look to our video here:

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Data Science, Statistics & Visualisation (DSSV) and the European Conference on Data Analysis (ECDA) are a joint virtual conference aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in the interplay of statistics, computer science, and visualization, and to build bridges between these fields for interdisciplinary research. The Conference will be hosted virtually by the Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) on July 6-9, 2021.

You can visit the conference website here.

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The University of Basel is hosting an online symposium on June 23, 2021 headed “An Open Approach to Closed-Loop Experimental Systems”. The symposium aims to provide an overview of existing closed-loop design-make-test platforms and projects from across the world.

The challenge to fully automate, and thereby enormously accelerate the iterative cycles of hypothesis and experimentation, has been first addressed many years ago. However, until recently, the technical hurdles were considered too high by most. With advances in the automation of chemistry, biology, and machine learning approaches, this has started to change. An increasing number of companies and institutions are taking on the challenge.

Dr. Nico Cruz was invited to the symposium and will share his insights about Digital Twins for Autonomous Bioprocess Development.

For further information, please, click here.

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The Future Labs Live 2021 aims to create the world´s most important R&D lab event focusing on digitalisation, connectivity and automation. Held on June 21-22, 2021, with over eighty top global experts and presented virtually, Future Labs will provide comprehensive and interactive coverage of the key issues and technologies in different topics, such as robotics, business models, systems integration and standardisation, ML, AI and big data.

Dr. Mark Dörr will have an oral contribution entitled “The LARA Software Suite: An open, standards-based tool to manage (the KIWI Biolab) closed-loop experimental system(s)”.

LARA is a research platform for fully automatized high throughput protein screening developed by Dr. Mark Dörr in the University of Greifswald . The facility covers experiment planning and design, mutant selection, cell-growth optimization, protein expression, cell harvesting and lysis as well as protein purification and activity assays.

To learn more about LARA please click here.

You can visit the Future Labs Live 2021 website here.

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Since 2014, the Live BioTalk EU and virtual discussion groups aims to empower their members to have world-class conversations, anywhere, anytime.

The goal is to bring together a small but focussed group of leading manufacturing and supply chain practitioners, innovators and solution providers from anywhere in the world onto a dedicated virtual platform for real time discussions on some of the key issues they are facing at the moment. The Virtual Talks are designed to build intimate business relationships, learn through experience, and look for targeted solutions.

Annina Kremer participated in the event with a talk about “Model-based high-throughput bioprocess development for therapeutic antibody fragment production”.

You can learn more about BioTalk VT here.

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The First International Symposium on High-Throughput Catalysts Design (HTCD 2021) will take place on 14-15.06.2021 in France in digital format.

This first edition of this symposium follows the construction of a collaboration network founded by several european high-throughput robotic platforms dedicated to research in biology (genome foundries, enzyme engineering platforms, microbiology/fermentation platforms, etc.). In order to greatly improve the exchange of knowledge on the use of high-throughput technologies and equipment for catalysts development between both academic and industrial researchers, the HTCD 2021 will extend the scientific domain of this network to chemistry and data treament.

Therefore, the HTCD 2021 will regroup scientists that study the automated synthesis, the testing and the characterization of chemo-, bio- and hybrid catalysts, as well as the methods recently developed to accelerate these steps with the use of new data treatments and artificial intelligence processes.

Prof. Uwe Bornscheuer (University of Greifswald), Dr. Mark Dörr (University of Greifswald) and Prof. Peter Neubauer (TU Berlin) are part of the scientific committee.

Dr. Stefan Born and Dr. Mark Dörr will present plenary talks entitled “Machine Learning Tools for Enzyme Development” and “Robot and Machine, Learning assisted Protein Engineering for improved BioCatalysis on the Robotic High-Throughput screening platform LARA” respectively.

Prof. Peter Neubauer is a plenary speaker for the Biology section, where he will talk about “Faster bioprocess development by model supported screening of new biocatalysts”.

You can visit the HTCD 2021 website here and have a look to the Program here.

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The 31st European Symposium on Computer-Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE-31) will take place in Istanbul from  June 6th to Wednesday, June 9th, 2021. The conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) community and provide a forum to present and evaluate emerging research methods and concepts, and to learn from industrial case studies.

The KIWI-biolab member, Prof. Ernesto Martínez, Professor of Systems and Organizations at the Technical University of Argentina (UTN) and Research Fellow at INGAR-CONICET, will present the KIWI-biolab platform at the 31st edition of the European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering with a poster entitled “Probabilistic Modeling for Optimization of Bioreactors using Reinforcement Learning with Active Inference”.

You can see the poster here:

You can visit the ESCAPE-31 website here.

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The development process for new drugs and biotechnologically produced medical devices is lengthy and very costly. In addition to the clinical phases, the R&D area for the selection of new active substances and materials and the strategy for their production, as well as the development of the actual manufacturing process up to the final industrial scale, is particularly critical. This process needs to be dramatically accelerated, especially with regard to the treatment of rare diseases (orphan drugs) and personalised medicine, in order to provide biopharmaceuticals and medical devices for small patient groups or individuals. By efficiently integrating state-of-the-art methods of informatics, digitalisation and laboratory automation, it should be possible to drastically shorten development times and increase the chances of success in selecting an effective active agent.

With this premise in mind, KIWI-biolab members Dr.-Ing. Marie-Therese Schermeyer and Prof. Peter Neubauer have organized, together with the team of the Der Simulierte Mensch – Si-M, Dr. Shirin Kadler and Prof. Roland Lauster, a ideation workshop to discuss the optimisation potential for the production process of biomedical products.

A further collaboration linking the different expertises between the teams is envisaged in a short-term future.

For more information, please click here.

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The 6th edition of the BioProScale Conference will take place on March 29-31, 2021, in a virtual format. The symposium is targeted at experts from research & development and industrial practice in the industrial bioprocessing of pharmaceuticals, food, feed and renewables

KIWI-biolab scientists and partners Dr. Mark Dörr, Dr. Sebastian Hans and Prof. Massimo Morbidelli were leading the session for High-Throughput Bioprocessing and Automation at the BioProScale 2021. Prof. Morbidelli (Politecnico di Milano) open the day with a plenary talk on “Digitalization platform and supervisory control for continuous integrated manufacture of monoclonal antibodies”. Dr. Dörr (University of Greifswald) shared his insights about the use of the high-throughput screening platform LARA for robot and machine learning assisted protein engineering. You can read more about LARA here. Dr. Hans (TU Berlin) gave a talk entitled “Towards an autonomous model based high-throughput bioprocess development and clone discrimination”.

Additionally, KIWI-biolab PhD students Lucas Kaspersetz and Judit Aizpuru presented their posters “Integration of a robotic small-scale bioreactor system
as a prerequisite for a selflearning and autonomous cultivation platform” and “Importance of oxygen signal shape matching for robust parameter estimation in bioprocess development” respectively. You can see the posters here:

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Dr. -Ing. Marie-Therese Schermeyer studied Bioengineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). After an exchange with Genentech, she decided to focus her research as a PhD student and postdoc on biopharmaceutical process development at the KIT. Her expertise lies in the area of automated high-throughput process development and protein stability analysis. In addition to her scientific expertise, she will use her communicative skills to build a strong network for the KIWI-biolab.

Lucas Kaspersetz holds a Master´s degree in Molecular Biotechnology from the Bielefeld University. He worked at Eppendorf as Bioprocess Service Specialist and at Novozymes OneHealth as Research Associate. He has a strong background in process development, and will work on the development and application of model-based methods for the monitoring, operation and experimental design of complex nonlinear biological processes.

Christoph Lange holds a Master´s degree in Mathematics from the FU Berlin. He worked at Zalando for some years, were he developed price optimization algorithms and sales forecasts. He has a strong background in supervised learning on large datasets, and he will focus his research on image and signal processing in TF3, working very close with TF1 to develop and apply state-of-the-art algorithms for image recognition.

Dr. Nghia Duong-Trung obtained his PhD in Machine Learning from Hildesheim University and worked as a full-time lecturer in the Can Tho University of Technology in Vietnam. He has a strong background in supervised learning and data mining, and many years of experience in deploying learning models in different types of data. He will develop and apply state-of-the-art algorithms for time series forecasting.    

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Dr. Jong Woo Kim got his PhD in February 2020 from Seoul National University. He has a strong background in process optimization and reinforcement learning. He will use his expertise in MPC and MHE to adapt these models to the special conditions in biotechnological set-ups.

Judit Aizpuru studied Physics and holds a M.Sc. in Computational Engineering and Intelligent System from the University of the Basque Country. Her previous works include benchmarking semi-supervised learning algorithms for manufacturing defect detection, feature selection and engineering for energy consumption prediction, and development of model-based recommendation system for process optimization. She will contribute to the KIWI-biolab with her expertise in the development of computational tools and methods for different applications.

Dr. Tilman Barz works as senior scientists at the Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH. He has many years of experience in modeling and model calibration, as well as optimal control and experimental design of dynamic systems in (bio)process engineering. He is an expert in data-driven analysis of nonlinear systems and has already played an essential role in the development of novel optimally controlled experiments in the laboratory of Bioprocess Engineering at the TU Berlin.

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Our project has been selected by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as one of the three international artificial intelligence laboratories of the future. The team has received a budget of about EUR 5 million for the next three years.

The goal of our Future Lab is to enable an autonomous lab for bioprocess development through research in AI, ML and automation for a more efficient and sustainable production. By doing so, Germany´s leading role in automated high-throughput bioprocess development will be consolidated and further expanded.

To achieve this goal, the KIWI-biolab will bring together 11 international scientists in different fields that will undertake an interdisciplinary approach to develop new digital solutions for the autonomous planning of experiments, the monitoring and control of robotic systems, the analysis and evaluation of the data generated, and the optimization of bioproduction processes.

With the support of the German Government program “AI made in Germany”, the KIWI-biolab will serve in the long-term as a platform to advance biotechnological processes, as this specific area possesses a high potential for improvement by using AI-based tools.

BMBF Press Release

TU Berlin Press Release

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