A major success for Dr. Marcel Wever of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (LUH|AI) and the L3S AI Research Center: Dr. Marcel Wever has secured funding for his own AI research group as part of the “AI Research Groups Lower Saxony” funding program run by zukunft.niedersachsen. His project, “Tuning for FFMs: Optimizing Post-Training Pipelines for Energy-Efficient AI” is one of only five projects selected statewide in the first funding round. With a total of 52 applications submitted, the acceptance rate is less than 10%, making it as competitive as Emmy Noether or ERC Starting Grants.
Marcel Wever is a postdoctoral researcher at LUHAI and a research group leader at the L3S Research Center. The new AI research group thus strengthens the close collaboration between the institute, the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and L3S in the field of fundamental AI research at the Hanover campus.
Sustainable AI Through Automated Optimization
Large foundational AI models (foundation models) enable powerful automation in nearly all areas of application. However, their operation is extremely energy-intensive. This is precisely where the project comes in: The research group is developing automated methods that tailor post-training pipelines specifically to concrete tasks and the available hardware. The goal is to significantly reduce energy consumption and computational effort without substantially compromising the models’ performance.
The goal is to make modern AI applications more sustainable, cost-effective, and accessible to a broader user base. This is a topic that aligns perfectly with LUH|AI’s research profile in the field of Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) and resource-aware AI, and ideally complements the research priorities of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as L3S in the areas of AI, data science, and trustworthy digital systems.
The Funding Program
Through the “Lower Saxony AI Research Groups” initiative, the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation aim to attract scientifically outstanding researchers in the early stages of their careers to Lower Saxony and to expand the development and application of AI in the state over the long term. The funded groups typically consist of one postdoctoral position for the scientific director and up to four doctoral positions. The projects run for five years; up to two million euros could be requested per application.
On the occasion of the selection, Science Minister Falko Mohrs highlighted the high quality of the submitted applications, which demonstrate how dynamically AI research is developing in Lower Saxony.
We warmly congratulate Dr. Marcel Wever on this tremendous success and look forward to the new research group at the institute!
Further information: Press release from zukunft.niedersachsen
