Tuule Müürsepp, ETH Zürich

Hurricane-like winter storms develop from the North Atlantic to Western Europe, causing millions of euros worth of damage and endangering people's lives. "Accurately predicting the location, timing and intensity of such extreme weather events has so far been a challenge," says Annika Oertel. Many of the physical processes take place over the Atlantic – an area that regular observation systems do not cover adequately. The large-scale NAWDIC measurement campaign will now use airborne and ground-based observations of the atmosphere to help improve weather forecasts and climate models.

Dominik Schreiber, KIT

Electronic hardware design, mathematical theorem proving, and verifying the security of critical systems are just a few examples of use for automated reasoning. “We understand Automated Reasoning as the algorithmic exploration of a formal rule set in order to deduce formally precise properties,” says Dominik Schreiber. His group conducts research at the intersection of algorithm engineering, parallel computing, and formal methods and develops efficient solving approaches for logical problems.

Markus Götz, KIT

Wildfires, floods and droughts: a new artificial intelligence (AI) from KIT promises to be a game-changer in providing more precise, faster, and energy-efficient predictions of such events. In the "WOW - a World model of Our World" project, researchers will develop an AI world model that combines multiple specialized AI sub-models through shared “latent spaces”. "Modern AI methods can not only cost-effectively imitate physics-based simulations, but can even learn correlations directly from observational data," says project coordinator Peer Nowack. The Carl Zeiss Foundation is funding the project with six million euros.