BMW Welt Muenchen
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During the interdisciplinary programme of the BMW Summer School 2018, 34 international PhD students, research peers, and industry experts shared their visions and discussed current advances and challenges in the field of Emotion-Aware Vehicle Assistants.

The participants in this year’s BMW Summer School had the opportunity to listen, share and learn about research topics and current frontiers in machine intelligence, more specifically in “smart services for organising personal mobility and providing features that reach well beyond the car”, which are being developed and handled for customers by emerging Intelligent Personal Assistants. With poster sessions and lean startup methodology, the students and professionals tried to get one step closer to building emotion-aware vehicle assistants. Twente University PhD student Francesco Walker turned out to be most convincing in the Poster Track. “While all presentations were great, Francesco Walker from University of Twente convinced our scientific committee with his research idea and to-the-point presentation on the benefits of extended peripersonal space during automated driving,” said Dr. Hans-Jörg Vögel, responsible for research into Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Services at the BMW Group.

The BMW Summer School 2018 was jointly set up in cooperation with the Franco-German University (UFA), EURECOM, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and BayFrance under the umbrella of the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future by TUM and the IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom). The Eindhoven University of Technology played its part thanks to professor Jacques Terken, who was one of the keynote speakers during the event.

“Once again, we experienced a very creative, collaborative and inspiring atmosphere. One reason is certainly the interdisciplinary and international group of participants that make the Summer School such a great forum for discussion of digital technologies and the mobility of the future,” said Prof. Ulrich Finger, director of EURECOM.