Dortmund / Bonn / Edmonton / Montréal / Toronto, October 2025. Pooling expertise, jointly advancing value-based progress in AI research and transfer – with this goal in mind, a delegation of researchers from the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence visited leading Canadian AI research institutions in October: the Amii – Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, the Mila – Quebec AI Institute, the Vector Institute, the University of Waterloo, the McGill University, the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, and the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM). The delegation specifically sought exchange on key topics in AI innovation: foundation models, AI in medicine, robotics, and responsible AI.
Shared Values, Shared Research Priorities
The exchange with Canadian research institutions highlighted that researchers from both countries are committed to taking a leading role in the responsible development and governance of artificial intelligence. “Germany and Canada are both conducting intensive research on sustainable, secure, and interpretable machine learning methods for developing powerful foundation models,” says Prof. Dr. Lucie Flek, Lamarr Chair for Natural Language Processing. “This provides an ideal foundation for long-term collaboration in the field of artificial intelligence.”
Intelligent technologies for safety-critical domains such as medicine and robotics were also the focus of the scientific exchange. To this end, Lamarr researchers met with domain experts from the leading technology company NVIDIA and from the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM). “Germany and Canada share the vision of improving medical care through AI – for the benefit of people and while upholding standards of trustworthiness and privacy,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Kamp, Principal Investigator at the Lamarr Institute.
International Collaboration as a Basis for Innovative AI Research
On site, the Lamarr researchers agreed with their Canadian partners to establish mutual exchange programs and initiate joint research projects along the delegation’s focus topics. Horizon Europe, the European Union’s central funding program for research and innovation, of which Canada has been an associate member since July 2024, provides an internationally recognized framework for this.
In addition to Lamarr researchers from TU Dortmund University, the University of Bonn, and the Fraunhofer Institutes IAIS and IML, experts from the Lamarr network at the University of Paderborn and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) joined the delegation. “North Rhine-Westphalia is a hotspot for AI research in Europe,” says Prof. Dr. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Lamarr Fellow from Paderborn. “The insights gained during the intensive scientific exchange of the delegation trip are already being developed into new neuro-symbolic learning methods.”