The Applied-AI Center @ HSLU

✨ Speaker announcement! We are excited to share the lineup for our AI Industry Event @ HSLU on 23 April... 💥 Every semester the AI Industry Event is hosted at the Applied AI Center @ HSLU in Rotkreuz. The event is open to students, staff and partners of HSLU, and in general to anyone who is interested in how AI is being applied in industry. We are once again delighted to announce a distinguished panel of experts... Max Lungarella CEO at ddrobotec® by Dynamic Devices Evelyne Pflugi, CEO and co-founder at The Singularity Group Max Buckley, Senior Software Engineer at Google Diana Nicoleta Popa, Senior NLP Research Engineer at Telepathy Labs 😎 This is an English speaking event. There will be presentations and Q&A, followed by food, drinks and networking. While attendance is free, the number of places is limited, so please register early here: https://lnkd.in/ekkD2yYq 🍻 Doors open 17:30, talks begin at 18:00. Hope to see you there! Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU Smart-up, HSLU – IT International, HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik, HSLU - Institut für Innovation und Technologiemanagement IIT, Hochschule Luzern - Digital Business & Innovation (HSLU DB&I), HSLU - Digital Energy and Electric Power (DEEP), HSLU – Digital Construction, Digital Festival, Digital Switzerland, Invest in Switzerland, Switzerland Global Enterprise, digitalswitzerland Zentralschweiz, Women in Data Science (WiDS) Zurich, Women in IT - HSLU, STAIR Student Association Informatics Rotkreuz, HSLU Alumni, Local AI Community (LAC), ITZ InnovationsTransfer Zentralschweiz, Industrie- und Handelskammer Zentralschweiz IHZ, Economic Promotion Canton of Zug, Schwyz Next, Lucerne Business, GRID Lucerne, Digital Veterans Association, DIDAS, Schlössli, Switzerland Innovation Park Central, Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATW, Fachgruppe AI - Swiss Engineering

🚀 Code, Karriere & KI – Dein Sprung in die Softwarewelt! Du brennst für Künstliche Intelligenz und willst wissen, welche Karrierechancen dich in der Tech-Branche erwarten? Dann solltest du dir dieses Event nicht entgehen lassen! Women in AI @ HSLU und Women in IT - HSLU laden dich herzlich ein zu einem spannenden Tech- und Karriere-Event, das dir die Türen in die Welt der Künstlichen Intelligenz und Softwareentwicklung öffnet! 📅 Wann: 20. März 2025, 12:00 - 13:30 📍 Wo: Suurstoffi 1, 6343 Rotkreuz, Audi Max ⚠️ Die Plätze sind begrenzt – sichere dir jetzt deinen Platz!   👩💻 Was dich erwartet: Einblicke in die innovativen KI-Projekte von Cudos AG Live-Demo – erlebe die Zukunft hautnah Erfahrungsbericht einer Softwareentwicklerin Tipps & Tricks zu Karrieremöglichkeiten für Berufseinsteiger:innen Professioneller CV-Check für deine Bewerbung im KI-Bereich Cudos AG ist ein innovatives Technologieunternehmen, das sich auf die Entwicklung skalierbarer und nachhaltiger Cloud- und KI-Lösungen spezialisiert hat. Mit einem starken Fokus auf dezentrale Technologien und Künstliche Intelligenz gestaltet Cudos AG die digitale Zukunft aktiv mit – und bietet spannende Karrierechancen für Talente, die in der Tech-Branche durchstarten wollen. 📲 Jetzt anmelden: https://lnkd.in/eNaTxMTn #WomenInAI #WomenInIT #TechJobs #Cudos #KI #Softwareentwicklung Local AI Community (LAC) Women in Data Science (WiDS) Zurich Women in AI Germany, Austria & Switzerland

👩🎓 How to examine students in the new age of AI? “A written paper alone is no longer enough.” – David Loher, HSLU. 🤖 At HSLU, we have just completed the first week of the new study term in 2025. Lot’s of students on campus, and many of them starting into bachelor and master theses, with a view to graduating in Summer. Writing a thesis used to be a daunting manual task for many students. But times have changed, there are now a raft of free or low-cost language models who can produce high quality text at the click of a button – think #ChatGPT, #Claude, #Grok, #Gemini, and so on. 📃 What does this new era of AI mean for the traditional learning goals of writing an academic thesis? And what does it mean for how to teach and examine these goals? Our recently published blog article addresses these question. Sarah Hauser is the vice dean for degree programs at our department of computer science. According to Sarah, for the students, “the focus is on the practical, self-developed part and the ability to present and defend the results.” You can read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gEpzwx9P In order to provide students clarity on what this means exactly, the HSLU has recently updated its examination guidelines, and released a position paper on the use of Gen AI in our academic settings. Both are freely available and can be found here: Examination guidelines: https://lnkd.in/eCf4H6nu Position paper: https://lnkd.in/enk2j5gg David Loher is a didactics specialist at our HSLU Center for Learning, Teaching and Research. He summarizes our position very well – “A written paper alone is no longer enough to assess a student's competence. A holistic approach is needed. Students should ask themselves: ‘What do I want to show with my work? Which part can AI do, and which not?’. And when using these tools, AI-supported texts must be marked as such. Good scientific practice means that the process of creating the text is clearly documented.” Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik, LAC² - Lucerne AI and Cognitive Community

📃 On February 12, 2025, the Swiss Federal Council set out guidelines for regulation of artificial intelligence. HSLU Prof. Isabelle Oehri shares her in-depth analysis. 💡 Isabelle is a HSLU lecturer, and Deputy Head of the Competence Center for Management and Law at the HSLU – Institut für Betriebs- und Regionalökonomie IBR, within the HSLU School of Business. In her latest blog article, she gives a detailed and sharp breakdown of the current situation in Swiss AI regulation, how it is changing, and what implications are arising. You can read the full article here: 🌐 https://lnkd.in/erjNir2x Key points: ✅ Switzerland ratifies the Council of Europe's AI convention ✅ Where legislative adjustments are required these should be sectoral in nature wherever possible ✅ Regulation should be technology-neutral, and be designed to be as competition-neutral as possible. ✅ The path that has now been taken fits with Switzerland's liberal approach of principle-based regulation. ✅ The prudent approach of only regulating where the application of existing law does not achieve adequate solutions is to be welcomed. ✅ A consultation draft for ratification of the AI Convention is to be prepared by the end of 2026. Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, LAC² - Lucerne AI and Cognitive Community, digitalswitzerland Zentralschweiz, Lucerne Business, ITZ InnovationsTransfer Zentralschweiz, Industrie- und Handelskammer Zentralschweiz IHZ, Economic Promotion Canton of Zug, GRID Lucerne, Women in Data Science (WiDS) Zurich, Digital Switzerland, Technologie Forum Zug, Zuger Wirtschaftskammer

✨ Save the date! Our AI Industry Event takes place in Rotkreuz on 23 Apr 2025 from 17:30. 🤖 🍻 🍕 🌷 This Spring, make sure to join our 9th AI Industry Event, at The Applied-AI Center @ HSLU. We have great speakers lined up, to cover the latest use-cases and industry developments in AI. If you are an AI student, this is a the perfect chance to network towards a future project or job. For industry professionals, it is an opportunity to explore the latest in Applied AI and what it can mean for your business. Come and join us! 🌐 The full program will be announced soon, follow our LinkedIn page to stay informed. Registrations are already open here: https://lnkd.in/ekkD2yYq Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik, LAC² - Lucerne AI and Cognitive Community, HSLU Alumni, HSLU – IT International, HSLU Smart-up, Switzerland Global Enterprise, Swiss AI Association, Switzerland Innovation Park Central, Women in AI Germany, Austria & Switzerland, Invest in Switzerland, Digital Switzerland, Women in Data Science (WiDS) Zurich, Women in Data Science (WiDS) Geneva, digitalswitzerland Zentralschweiz, digitalswitzerland, Digital Festival, Digital Veterans Association, DIDAS, Schlössli, Economic Promotion Canton of Zug, Lucerne Business, GRID Lucerne, Hochschule Luzern - Digital Business & Innovation (HSLU DB&I), Industrie- und Handelskammer Zentralschweiz IHZ, Schwyz Next, Digital Cluster Uri, CSEM, Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATW, swisstech

✨ A magic day for the Applied AI Center! Congrats to our Senior Researcher Marc Bravin who successfully defended his PhD thesis summa cum laude! 🤩 👨🎓 Marc completed his Doctoral studies under the supervision of Reto Hofstetter at the University of Lucerne and Marc Pouly at HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik. His research focus is unlocking consumer insights from unstructured data with #ArtificialIntelligence. A cornerstone of the work rested on building a huge database of TikTok videos and modelling engagement behavior – how to understand it and how to improve it. It was very interesting to see how his original ideas, that started before #ChatGPT and the #GenAI revolution, have evolved rapidly along the crest of the current AI wave. A challenging and exciting time to be an AI researcher! 🌞 😎 This was a wonderful day for you Marc and your family & friends. Enjoy it! Congratulations for an insightful and entertaining presentation and for this impressive interdisciplinary achievement at the intersection of technology and marketing. We are proud to have you at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts!

🌞 What makes a great AI Program? Great people! https://lnkd.in/gXDFi8vQ 🚀 This week we held our AI/ML Bachelor Strategy workshop at the Applied AI Center. Our team recognizes the transformative importance of #ArtificialIntelligence for Switzerland, and has spent many years fine-tuning our program to offer one of the most up-to-date and comprehensive undergraduate AI degrees in Europe. 💡 This time around we went into great detail on the topics of curriculum dependencies, elective & minors planning, improving the classroom experience, as well as extending our projects track & industrial collaboration. Thanks to all the team for some great ideas how we can do even better as the primary location in Switzerland for education in Applied AI. 🌐 Learn More about us... AI/ML Bachelor: https://lnkd.in/gXDFi8vQ Our Curriculum: https://lnkd.in/ewkFjKMH The Applied AI Center @ HSLU: https://lnkd.in/efSW5piy Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik, LAC² - Lucerne AI and Cognitive Community, Switzerland Global Enterprise, Switzerland Innovation Park Central, GIBZ Gewerblich-industrielles Bildungszentrum Zug, Kantonsschule Zug, ICT-Berufsbildung Zentralschweiz, Swissmem Berufsbildung, ICT-Berufsbildung Schweiz , Kantonsschule Alpenquai Luzern, BBZ Wirtschaft, Informatik und Technik Willisau, Thomas Koller, Florian Herzog, Jana Koehler, Andreas Marfurt, Forooz Shahbazi, Selina Scherrer, Zofia Baranczuk, Reinhard Bürgy, Donnacha Daly, Simone Lionetti, Curdin Derungs, Catherine Hayden, Dr. Christian Rohrdantz, Dieter A., Javier Montoya, Antonio Del Roio, Shaelom Fischer, Umberto Michelucci, Dr. Aygul Zagidullina, Björn Jensen, Fabian Widmer

👩💻 Our AI/ML Bachelor student Luca Gafner has completed a semester project exploring the application of machine learning to automated data-cleaning. 📃 Researchers from the Applied AI Research Lab at HSLU recently presented “SelfClean: A Self-Supervised Data Cleaning Strategy” at NeurIPS 2024. In his  Semester project, Luca explored the use of this technology for other data sets such as images of surgical tools, and images of clothing. He has written up his findings an accessible blog which you can read here: https://lnkd.in/gkuW4taY 💥 His conclusion? SelfClean offers the possibility to semi-automatically detect data quality-related issues in image datasets with up to 20'000 samples. Tools like SelfClean make data quality assessment faster and more efficient, which gives machine learning engineers more time to focus on developing and fine-tuning their models. 😎 Well don Luca, this is exactly the kind of applied-AI work we want to see from our students! Want to know more? You can read the original SelfClean paper here: https://lnkd.in/eAQidcj4 Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik, LAC² - Lucerne AI and Cognitive Community

🌞 Report from Madrid! Two of our AI/ML Students spent the Autumn Semester 2024 at IE University. Find out below what Jannik Bundeli and Leon Krug got up to... 💬 "Our time in #Madrid left us full of wonderful memories, new friendships from all over the world, and a deep love for this amazing city. We are so thankful for the chance to do an exchange semester at IE University." 👩💻 "We enrolled in various modules including three from the Bachelor in Computer Science and AI: High Performance Computing (HPC), AI Reasoning and Problem Solving, and Audio and Video Processing. " https://lnkd.in/e4CJDw-D 🤖 "In HPC, we investigated the impact of low-precision bits on training and their applications in HPC. In AI Reasoning and Problem Solving, we developed algorithms for various games, including Stratego, Nine Men’s Morris, and Brisca. Our personal highlight, however, was the a/v project, where we developed a Discord Bot capable of transcribing, translating, and summarizing conversations within Discord Voice Channels. To enhance its functionality, we fine-tuned a Whisper Transformers Model with a Swiss German dataset from ETH Zurich, enabling support for Swiss German—a capability rarely available in most transcription systems." 🌐 Each of these modules featured engaging on-campus theory sessions with exceptional professors and included practical, hands-on projects. For the a/v project, our code is available online: +Discord Bot integration: https://lnkd.in/eDbXcNFv +Fine-tuning process: https://lnkd.in/ehu9Pwpe +Fine-tuned model on Hugging Face: https://lnkd.in/eazRcEyF ⚽ "Madrid gave us so many great experiences outside of studying. We loved eating delicious tapas at Plaza Mayor, walking through Retiro Park, watching soccer games and shopping on Gran Vía. We also got to explore other neighbourhoods like Malasaña, La Latina or Salamanca, which showed us even more of Madrid’s special charm. We fell in love with Spain’s culture and also learned a lot of Spanish." 😎 "Living in a new country and getting to know a different culture opened our minds and made us more confident. We’ve learned so much, and these experiences will stay with us forever. If you’re thinking about doing something like this, we can only say: go for it! You’ll learn so much, meet great people, and come back with memories you’ll always keep in mind." 🙏 "A big thank you to everyone who made this possible: our home university, the International Office, IE University, our classmates, and all the new friends we met along the way. This semester was truly one of the best experiences we had!." "Madrid, you will always have a special place in our hearts. ¡Hasta luego!” Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik, HSLU – IT International, Embassy of Spain in Switzerland,

How can we visualize and understand the behavior of language models? Our AI/ML Bachelor student Rahel Preisig explored this in her ML-Ops semester project. Watch the video below! 🎬 ✨ 👩💻 LLMs are often criticized as being black boxes whose answers are not explainable based on the provided context. Captum is an open source library for model interpretability built on PyTorch, which is intended to address this problem. https://captum.ai/ 💡 At HSLU – Hochschule Luzern – Informatik we have a 3 ECTS module for AI/ML seniors in "Machine Learning Operations" run by Dr. Andreas Marfurt. In her recent semester project for this module, Rahel P. investigated the performance of Captum for feature attribution in a small experiment. ❓ Want to know the results? Check out her short video, which offers some excellent insights. (click on the image). 🚀 Congratulations Rahel, you have a bright career ahead. 😎 Watch this space for more interesting ML-Ops projects coming soon. Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, LAC² - Lucerne AI and Cognitive Community, Women in Data Science (WiDS) Zurich, Women in AI Germany, Austria & Switzerland