Our Mission

The challenges of our time are complex and global in nature and resolving them requires solutions that are equally competent and interdisciplinary. This interdisciplinarity forms the cornerstone of ELLIS Life Heidelberg — a group of 11 researchers with a mission of developing AI-mediated approaches to resolve current and future challenges in the life sciences. We are the Heidelberg unit of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) that comprises 30 units all over Europe. We aim to facilitate breakthrough applications of AI and Machine Learning (ML), to deliver leading-edge analytics that can fully exploit the rapidly growing volumes of biomedical data across Europe. The unit conducts foundational research to address key challenges and obstacles in deploying AI in biomedicine. This includes methods to cope with the heterogeneous and often noisy nature of “omics” data as well as the scarcity of labelled data in medical imaging. We employ algorithms and infrastructure to tackle the ethical and privacy constraints of data access, novel statistics to infer causal relationships, and innovative modelling strategies to deliver interpretable and auditable decisions.