Research
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) Osnabrück The DFKI Smart Enterprise Engineering research department, headed by Prof. Dr. Oliver Thomas, researches digital business models for the company of the future. All research projects are application-oriented and are developed in close cooperation with large international corporations as well as with "hidden champions" and SMEs. New and innovative methods and tools for the design and use of smart products, smart services and smart systems are developed and applied in various federal, state and industry-funded projects. Prof. Thomas' DFKI team emphasizes the comprehensive digital collection, processing and use of data and drives the development of value creation mechanisms based on this data. To this end, humans and AI are interpreted as part of a joint value creation system and their cooperative service provision is brought into focus. Fields of application that have already been researched and technically implemented include recommender agents for corporate organization, middleware platforms for designing process structures, mobile and portable assistance systems for proactive information provision in technical service areas, logistics and healthcare, as well as the prediction of system states in mechanical and plant engineering and trade. With these topics, autonomous systems and services are positioned as an important tool for operational information management. The Smart Enterprise Engineering research area has the vision of leveraging the potential of comprehensive information provision by combining the perspectives of business informatics and artificial intelligence and exploiting competitive advantages, especially for SMEs, through the support and (partial) automation of complex activities. Prof. Thomas pays particular attention to the interdisciplinary orientation, which consistently expands his business management focus to include the necessary technological perspectives. The research area headed by Prof. Thomas works closely with the Department of Information Management and Information Systems (IMWI) at the University of Osnabrück and is involved in the Lower Saxony innovation network SmartHybrid.
Address
Hamburger Straße 24, 49084 Osnabrück, Germany