“Luxembourg is nurturing a pan-European innovation ecosystem,” prime minister Xavier Bettel (DP) said in the press release by the department of media, telecommunications and digital policy. He further called the cooperation “big news for our local innovators”. 

The collaboration, which has its origins in a 5 July 2018 MoU, will initially have a team of six people from the University of Luxembourg’s high-performance computing team, its Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), its Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (List). 

The founders of the AI lab--kickstarted by Digital Luxembourg--plan on eventually opening it up to the startup community and industry partners, given they see an ever-increasing demand for the technology for a variety of applications--from space research to finance, and beyond.

‘The equivalent of a time machine’

The team will work on joint projects, aided by Nvidia’s international experience and research in virtual reality, high performance computing and AI--computing which Nvidia has called in its own marketing material “the essential tool of the da Vincis and Einsteins of our time. For them, we’ve built the equivalent of a time machine.”

The company’s VP of sales and marketing EMEAI, Jaap Zuiderveld, has has called their technology “indispensable”, adding that the agreement will help “support Luxembourg’s research community as they tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems.”

University of Luxembourg rector Stéphane Pallage hails both the “cutting-edge equipment” and “the experience in addressing real-world problems using AI” brought to the table by Nvidia, adding: “This will allow [our researchers] to both identify new application areas and to push ahead with existing work, from our use of drones for automated airplane and bridge inspections to the analysis of genomes and mobile health sensor data.”