SIC start-up collaborates with Villeroy & Boch

Specialists who evaluate data for companies using mathematical methods and thus secure a lead in the race for customers and profits are desperately sought after. The data science start-up “d:AI:mond ” from the Saarbrücken Informatics Campus at Saarland University responds to this need and offers companies expertise in the form of two professors and two other internationally renowned experts. After a successful incubation phase in the IT incubator at Saarland University, one thing is certain: the concept will work. Since mid-October, d:AI:mond has been registered as a GmbH in the commercial register and can already boast well-known customers.

The team behind “d:AI:mond” is reminiscent of the superheroes from the comic series “The Fantastic Four”. However, Professor Verena Wolf, Professor Jens Dittrich, Thilo Krüger and Endre Palatinus do not win by using superpowers. They advise with concentrated expertise, which they have developed in countless projects from industry and research, located in specialist areas that make up or even enrich data science. Verena Wolf is Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University with a focus on modeling and simulation. In 2013, the German edition of the MIT magazine “Technology Review” featured her as a “Young Innovator under 35”. Jens Dittrich conducts research in the fields of databases, data management and big data, Endre Palatinus holds a doctorate in data science with a focus on data management, and Thilo Krüger is known as an expert in statistics and machine learning in the fields of chemistry and epigenetics.

“Companies in Data Science quickly reach a point where they can’t get any further,” explains Krüger. “This is exactly our strength,” Wolf continues, “When a company’s task is very complex, our different research areas allow us to go deeper and work out a creative solution.”

Since the spring of 2017, the researchers have been working on their new enterprise, which was also considered worthy of funding by the IT incubator of the Max Planck Society and Saarland University. In the meantime, the incubation phase has been completed and d:AI:mond has already received six concrete orders from the chemical, automotive and manufacturing industries. At the ceramic goods manufacturer Villeroy & Boch in Mettlach, a good 50 kilometers away, d:AI:mond, for example, has simulated production in order to demonstrate possibilities for better capacity utilization.

“To have such customers as a young start-up is really impressive,” explains Björn Maurer, who accompanied the start-up during incubation as incubation manager. The IT incubator has already bought shares in the start-up. d:AI:mond now wants to grow further in the coming months. Therefore, Professor Wolf and her colleagues are already looking for new premises for their company.

Background: Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC)
The core of the Saarland Informatics Campus is the Department of Computer Science at Saarland University. Six other world-renowned research institutes conduct research in the immediate vicinity on the campus. In addition to the two Max Planck Institutes for Computer Science and Software Systems, these are the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Center for Bioinformatics, the Intel Visual Computing Institute, the CISPA Helmholtz Center i.G. and the Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction”, MMCI for short.

Further information:
http://daimond.ai

Questions can be directed to:
Professor Verena Wolf
Modeling and Simulation
Saarland Informatics Campus
E-mail: verena@daimond.ai
Phone: +49 681 302-5636

Professor Jens Dittrich
Big Data Analytics Group
Saarland Informatics Campus
E-mail: jens@daimond.ai
Phone: +49 681 302-70141

Editorial office:
Gordon Bolduan
Competence Center Computer Science Saarland
Saarland Informatics Campus
Phone: +49 681 302 70 741
E-mail: bolduan@mmci.uni-saarland.de