Luxembourg, NVIDIA Team for AI Lab

January 31, 2019

Luxembourg’s research community, the Luxembourg Government, and NVIDIA have created a joint AI laboratory in Luxembourg. The national AI collaboration, the first with NVIDIA in Europe, is a milestone towards working together to solving society’s most important challenges using artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

This collaboration follows a memorandum of understanding signed on the 5th of July 2018 between NVIDIA and the Luxembourg Government.

Enabled by the government’s "Digital Luxembourg" initiative, the joint AI laboratory will encourage research in diverse fields. Members of Luxembourg’s research community will be able to work closely with NVIDIA, which employs some of the world’s best computer scientists.

NVIDIA, the University of Luxembourg’s High-Performance Computing Team, its Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), its Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) have initially committed to dedicate a team of six people to work on joint projects. The AI lab will work in close connection with the global AI research approach of NVIDIA and be supported by a joint advisory board. Each institution will gain better access to cutting-edge NVIDIA hardware and software, for use in tackling their most difficult research problems.

To further the government’s goal to catalyze collaboration and enable innovative initiatives, Digital Luxembourg kickstarted this project to open up new resources to Luxembourg’s innovation and research ecosystem. "I am very glad to see that NVIDIA wants to be a part of Luxembourg’s growing pan-European innovation ecosystem. Digital Luxembourg has proven once again that it can provide the leverage our innovators need to reach for something big: AI research with NVIDIA’s direct help is big," noted Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, who added that "our country is proud to be the first European country to create an AI partnership with NVIDIA."

"In the post-Moore’s law era, NVIDIA’s technology has become an indispensable tool for scientists and researchers seeking to accelerate and deploy the power of AI and high performance computing," said Jaap Zuiderveld, NVIDIA Vice President of Sales and Marketing EMEAI. "This agreement brings together NVIDIA hardware, software, and expertise to support Luxembourg’s research community as they tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems."

"This partnership will give our researchers access to cutting-edge equipment," said University of Luxembourg Rector Stéphane Pallage. "But most importantly, it will enable them to tap into NVIDIA’s experience in addressing real-world problems using artificial intelligence. This will allow them to both identify new application areas and to push ahead with existing work, from our use of drones for automated airplane and bridge inspections to the analysis of genomes and mobile health sensor data. We are also particularly excited about the interdisciplinary nature of the partnership. Tackling real-world problems involves bringing together experts from across disciplines."

Fernand Reinig, CEO a.i. of LIST welcomed the agreement: "NVIDIA technology is proven to be the best for high performance computing. LIST is working on innovation domains that require such high-performance capacities, in particular in Industry 4.0, in finance and RegTech, for the environment as well as for the autonomous vehicles. With this partnership, LIST researchers will be in direct connection with the NVIDIA research teams focused on the best use of the NVIDIA technologies concerning the application domain we are addressing. Moreover, through its numerous industrial partnerships, LIST will use this agreement to ease the link between NVIDIA technologies and local industry innovation."

Initially bootstrapped by the research community, the founders plan to open up the AI laboratory to Luxembourg’s industry partners and startup community. There is a growing demand for AI-related technologies in Luxembourg, including in finance, healthcare, space resources research and more.

In parallel to the setup of the joint AI laboratory, and based upon the memorandum of understanding with NVIDIA, Digital Luxembourg will support the creation of AI-related courses to Luxembourg’s innovators and researchers as well as to industry and individuals.

Digital Luxembourg strives to push further Luxembourg’s digital frontrunner status, notably by supporting strategic actors and kick-starting strategic projects that drive cutting-edge technological developments in Luxembourg. It is in this regard that Digital Luxembourg’s overall goal remains to provide Luxembourg with an excellent environment for the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.