European AI act
State Space Models
The 33rd meeting of the Cologne AI ML (CAIML) took place on November 19 at the Cologne office of the commercial law firm Oppenhoff. What was special about this meeting was the combination of a legal aspect, the European AI act, with a brilliant technical presentation of state space models as an alternative to transformer models.
Venue
The CAIML event #33 took place on November 19 at the Cologne office of Oppenhoff. Opening of the session by Marc Müller, one of the organizers of the CAIML meetup.
Marc Müller
Agenda
Talk 1
Valentino Halim and Axel Grätz – both lawyers at Oppenhoff
The AI Act from a developer’s perspective
The AI Act, as the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence, came into force on 1 August 2024. Not all systems and applications that computer scientists conventionally consider to be AI also falls under the scope of the regulation. Valentino Halim and Dr. Axel Grätz will explain and discuss the criteria and issues in distinguishing between AI and ordinary software. In addition, they will give you an overview of your obligations when developing and deploying or providing AI under the AI Act.
Talk 2
Gerhard Paaß – Senior Researcher at Fraunhofer IAIS:
State Space Models as an Alternative to the Transformer?
By using the transformer, generative language models are for the first time able to generate plausible texts of high quality. However, the computational and memory requirements increase quadratically with the length of the input. State-space models offer a way to account for longer input in language models. The talk gives a short introduction to these models and discusses some benchmark results. It is shown that combinations of transformers and state-space models offer a number of advantages. Some applications of state space models are also mentioned.
Impressions
Valentino Halim
Dr. Axel Grätz
Dr. Gerhard Paaß
Slides
The presentation slides and corresponding links are available here:
- Oppenhoff: slideshare
- Gerhard Paaß: tbd
After session
After the event, active networking between the participants and speakers took place over a delicious buffet and cold drinks, sponsored by Oppenhoff.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Oppenhoff partner Dr. Marc Hilber (LL.M.), the speakers and to the CAIML team, Marc Müller, Aaqib Parvez Mohammed (et al.) for organizing, hosting and sponsoring this great AI event.
Further Information
CAIML aims to bring together people interested in AI and machine learning. For more information visit & join us:
Retrospective
Don’t miss the previous meetups of the CAIML community in Cologne: