Successful next step in the Excellence Strategy
TU Darmstadt has the chance of establishing three Clusters of Excellence – two of them in the field of AI
2024/02/02
Huge success for the Technical University of Darmstadt: In the prestigious Excellence Strategy from the German federal and state governments, TU Darmstadt has reached an important milestone. It has been selected and invited to prepare full applications for the outline proposals “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI), “The Adaptive Mind” (TAM) and “CoM2Life” in fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and biomaterials and submit them for funding as part of the Cluster of Excellence funding line. The selections were made by an international panel of experts. A total of 143 outline proposals were submitted to the German Research Foundation (DFG), of which 41 have now been invited to submit full applications for the second round of the Excellence Strategy funding programme.
Highly competitive selection procedure
The Excellence Strategy is a funding programme of the German federal and state governments to strengthen cutting-edge research in Germany. Projects must overcome a highly competitive, multi-stage selection procedure in order to receive funding. TU Darmstadt has now been invited to submit full applications to establish Clusters of Excellence for the projects “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI) , “The Adaptive Mind” (TAM) and CoM2Life in the next stage of the process. The project CoM2Life is being carried out jointly with Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. The decisions on which projects can establish new Clusters of Excellence and which existing clusters that were set up during the first round of proposals will receive continued funding will be made in May 2025. Funding can be provided to a total of up to 70 Clusters of Excellence and the German federal and state governments provide total funding of 539 million euros per year for this purpose.
Von der Entscheidung profitieren auch die Wissenschaftsregion Rhein-Main sowie die Rhein-Main-Universitäten (RMU), die Allianz aus TU Darmstadt, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt und Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
About the excellence strategy of the federal and state governments
To further strengthen the international competitiveness of research at German universities, the federal and state governments have established the Excellence Strategy as a funding programme. The key objective of the Excellence Strategy is to strengthen top-level research in areas that are internationally competitive, to institutionally strengthen German universities, and to advance the development of the German higher education system.
To this end, the Excellence Strategy comprises two separate but intertwined funding lines. The “Clusters of Excellence” funding line, coordinated by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) provides project-based funding for internationally competitive research areas at German universities. The “Universities of Excellence” funding line, coordinated by the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat – WR), is designed to fund institutional strategies that promise to strengthen universities as a whole and create outstanding framework conditions for excellent research.
