"The cooperation with DFKI is part of our strategy to strengthen Continental as a technology company by using artificial intelligence at all levels. Continental will become an 'AI empowered company'," said Kurt Lehmann, Corporate Technology Officer at Continental, at the signing of the agreement. "AI will support our employees in their work and provide them with new tools." Furthermore, AI is a central pillar for the mobility of the future. "Today, we assume that autonomous driving will not be possible without artificial intelligence technologies," emphasizes Lehmann.

Joint research in the DFKI ecosystem
The joint Intelligent Technologies (FIT) research laboratory will be set up at the DFKI site in Kaiserslautern. Here, Continental employees will research basic principles and address specific problems in the ecosystem of DFKI laboratories. Among other things, AI-supported methods of data evaluation and software development will be researched. Among other things, the company is working on the development of AI-based tools to help the more than 16,000 employees worldwide in software and IT with quality assurance and functional enhancements.

Professor Andreas Dengel heads the DFKI research department "Smart Data & Knowledge Services". For him, sustainable corporate management today requires active and comprehensive knowledge management: "The main task is to enable lean, decentralized and continuously learning organizations to act flexibly and coherently at the same time."

To this end, the experts are developing automated, personal knowledge assistants: systems that identify documents and automatically recognize people, projects, events or locations, for example. Knowledge assistants help to configure workflows individually and provide relevant information in every environment.

Accelerated object recognition thanks to artificial neural networks
Continental is also relying on AI in its product development. In 2020, the technology company wants to bring neural networks into series production on a larger scale for the first time with its 5th camera generation for accelerated object recognition. Artificial neural networks consist of adaptive mathematical units that can process and execute complex functions.

Artificial intelligence research field
In order to coordinate the various research activities relating to artificial intelligence, Continental has had a central pre-development department for AI topics since 2015. The
company cooperates with NVIDIA, Baidu and numerous research institutes in this field, such as the University of Oxford, TU Darmstadt and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (India). In Budapest (Hungary), the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems division opened a competence center for deep machine learning in May 2018. By the end of 2018, Continental will employ around 400 engineers worldwide with special AI expertise and is looking for further talent for product and process development in the field of artificial intelligence. kp