EXA4MIND hosts its third plenary meeting in Garching

From 23 to 25 April, the EXA4MIND consortium met in Garching, Munich, at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) premises, to host its third plenary meeting. This was the first face-to-face consortium meeting of 2024, which allowed partners to review crucial topics for the development of the EXA4MIND project, such as the next deliverables and the preparation for the project review meeting that will take place in the coming months.

Three days of intense work have served to review the progress made by the different technical and scientific teams of the project, and to mark the roadmap to reach the established milestones and to succeed in the important dates that lie ahead of us as a project. ‘We now have innovative preprocessing, data management and querying systems in the first versions. To make optimum use of these in the application cases, we need to be all on the same page – technical and scientific researchers. That’s an important challenge for the next months’, says Stephan Hachinger , science and co-design coordinator of EXA4MIND.

It was a special meeting, where thanks to the presence of the External Advisory Board & Ethical Advisor, the consortium was able to get direct feedback, not only on the development of the project to date, but also on upcoming deliverables and milestones. The next project review meeting, which will take place after the summer break, was another important point discussed by the consortium and the External Advisory Board & Ethical Advisor.

“I thank all the partners who joined the face-to-face meeting, especially our host, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. I am pleased by the partners′ recent work results and appreciate that they outlined their plans for the upcoming months. The meeting provided an excellent environment for in-depth discussions and collaborative planning, aiming to synchronise our efforts and plan future project milestones,” concludes Jan Martinovi? , Project Coordinator of EXA4MIND.

Scientific contributions

A new method to improve the safety and reliability of autonomous driving thanks to the EXA4MIND project

The EXA4MIND project was launched on 1 January 2023. The consortium consists of ten partners from six European countries, including partners from the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics at the ?eské vysoké u?ení technické v Praze (CIIRC CTU) and Valeo.ai company. They have now introduced a new method to search image data from autonomous vehicles using natural language.

Antonín Vobecky and Josef ?ivic from CIIRC CTU, in collaboration with Valeo.ai, have achieved significant success in developing machine learning models for data analysis, particularly image data from autonomous vehicles. Their methods, which have the potential to enhance the safety and reliability of autonomous driving, were presented at the prestigious NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans, which focuses on machine learning.

“In our paper POP-3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Occupancy Prediction from Images we presented a method that processes 360° camera images of a car’s surroundings as input, and produces a 3D semantic map of the occupancy of the surrounding environment. In addition, the user can ask the system in natural language about the location of objects in this digital 3D space. The capability to make queries in natural language allows for semantic occupancy segmentation or text-driven search in 3D, both performed exclusively from 2D images taken by the vehicle’s cameras,” explains Antonín Vobecky , a PhD student in ELLIS Unit Prague at CIIRC CTU. Questions asked might be, for example, “Where is the plastic trash bin?” or “Where is the black truck with the trailer?”.

The overall motivation is to develop methods to search for corner case situations, which are safety-critical but often rare in the driving recordings. The goal of the research is to enable the retrieval of these captured situations in huge files of petabytes of data by simply entering instructions in natural language.?“Once such situations are found, they can be used as additional training data to improve existing machine-learning models and algorithms for autonomous driving so that systems can better deal with such situations and, as a result, improve the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles,”?adds Vobecky.

This research was carried out as part of the?EXA4MIND?project. In the project, the team collaborates with one of the European automotive leaders, Valeo.ai, to develop tools for large-scale management and analysis of driving data, which will lead to safer systems used in autonomous cars.

Participation in international events

EXA4MIND project promoted at HiPEAC 2024

The HiPEAC conference was held in Munich from January 17 to January 19, 2024. As a leading European event, it gathered experts in computer architecture, programming models, compilers, and operating systems applicable to general-purpose, embedded, and cyber-physical systems. The conference featured 74 sessions, including the 2nd workshop on projects cross-synergy in advancing exascale platforms and quantum computing (CONCERTO).

The workshop was designed to promote discussions between academic researchers and industrial companies engaged in various European projects. It aimed to emphasize the unique characteristics of these projects and foster collaborative efforts, which are essential for developing next-generation exascale platforms. Looking ahead to the new European petascale, pre-exascale systems, and the forthcoming exascale supercomputers, the workshop offered a unique platform to share ideas and outcomes. This included discussions on incorporating cutting-edge heterogeneous hardware solutions like quantum computing and neuromorphic devices, specific software components and frameworks, and adapting large and complex application workflows for these advanced systems.

The senior researcher Martin Golasowski sowski from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center joined the workshop and presented the LEXIS Platform, its architecture and its use in various European projects, including the EXA4MIND project.

e-INFRA CZ conference 2024: Fostering collaboration and innovation in Czech Research infrastructure

The e-INFRA CZ Conference 2024, held in Prague at the end of April, brought together an assembly of researchers, academics, and experts interested in enhancing the Czech Republic’s research infrastructure. This annual event, known for spotlighting the latest trends and innovations in the environment providing complex capacities and resources for the transmission, storage and processing of scientific data to all entities engaged in research and development, continues to serve as a pivotal platform for discussing advancements and fostering collaborations across various scientific disciplines.

This year’s conference focused on the present e-INFRA CZ infrastructure, its services, and research activities. The conference featured several talks, best practices and a panel discussion that summarised the challenges and opportunities within the digital infrastructure landscape. It also introduced the latest news and outlined the plans. The programme offered not only sessions dedicated to networks, data, and computing but also to the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud in the Czech Republic and the roadmap for e-INFRA CZ.

One of the highlights of the conference was a talk given by Martin Golasowski from the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center . His presentation on “HPC-as-a-Service and distributed data management” outlined achievements of the LEXIS Platform in leveraging advanced computing and data management technologies to enhance computational and data-driven research across Europe. In his talk, he presented the objectives of the EXA4MIND project and a planned extension of the data staging capabilities of the LEXIS Platform. He also provided a live demonstration of a containerised AI workflow orchestrated by LEXIS running on IT4Innovations’ supercomputers. The users of the national e-infrastructure come from various scientific fields handling large data and complex computations and may benefit from the project results in the future.

This two-day event helped its attendees to dive deep into the e-INFRA CZ infrastructure, showcasing its services, international collaborations, and research.?The conference not only provided a forum for sharing knowledge and best practices but also strengthened the community’s resolve to pursue a future where digital and computational resources are more interconnected and universally accessible.

Campaign: Faces of EXA4MIND

With the series ‘Faces of EXA4MIND’ we want to introduce the people who work every day to achieve our ambitious goal: Building a platform for Extreme Data that enables advanced data analytics on supercomputers and automated data management with support for integration by design with EOSC and European data spaces.

After introducing the project coordinator and the scientific coordinator, we continue the campaign with four other members of the consortium.

Antonín Vobecky (CTU)

We present Antonín Vobecky, PhD student at the ?eské vysoké u?ení technické v Praze (CTU), and machine learning researcher of EXAMIND. "This project will really push the boundaries of how machines can automatically learn from large scale data in autonomous driving"?he explains when asked what makes this project special.

Watch his interview here.

Pinar Karagoz (METU)

We present Pinar Karagoz from the Orta Do?u Teknik üniversitesi (METU), and data mining researcher of EXA4MIND. "I really do hope and believe that? EXA4MIND will provide a platform, which will accelerate the development of AI solutions on HPC involving extreme data", she explains when asked what makes this project special.

Watch her interview here.

Mohamad Hayek (BADW-LRZ)

We present Mohamad Hayek from the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) and data management researcher of EXA4MIND. "The advancement of application cases that use databases led to the need of advanced storage and computing resources mostly available at supercomputing centres. At the same time, supercomputing centres lack a concrete solution for the use of database management systems. What makes EXA4MIND special and what will generate a positive impact, is our attempt to fill that gap by providing a database management solution",?he explains when asked what makes this project special.

Watch his interview here.

Arantxa Echarte (AUSTRALO)

We present Arantxa Echarte from AUSTRALO and the outreach, exploitation & collaboration leader of EXA4MIND. "EXA4MIND aims to democratise access to Extreme Data for SMEs and industrial ecosystem. The project will be a stepping stone in the path to next-generation data processing, paving the way to a new reality where handling ever growing amounts of data is possible", she explains when asked what makes this project special.

Watch her interview here.

Upcoming events

EXA4MIND will present its activities at Europe's biggest supercomputing conference

We are excited to invite you to ISC High Performance 2024, the foremost event dedicated to high-performance computing, machine learning, and data analytics. It will take place in Hamburg from 12 to 16 May 2024, and the EXA4MIND project will be there represented by its coordinator.

IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center will be one of the exhibitors and present its activities and projects it is involved in. Take this opportunity to network with the partners of the EXA4MIND project, who will be present at booth J22.

More information here.