DIZH Fellowships are awarded in a competitive selection process to ambitious ZHAW researchers. The university-wide funding scheme for research excellence sends its fellows to the joint research cluster of the Digitalization Initiative of the Canton of Zurich, DIZH, located at the University of Zurich. DIZH Fellowships last for up to 2 years and can fund a fellow plus a PhD student.

Prof. Stadelmann’s research endeavor for the fellowship builds on top of the CAI panel discussions on pathways beyond present AI and the recently released "Theory of Natural Intelligence" that proposes a possible key to the emergence of intelligence in biological learners. Goal of the fellowship is to develop a technical implementation of the concept of self-organizing netfragments within contemporary deep artificial neural nets. Together with a PhD student, the team will start ca. mid-2023, supported by colleagues from neuroinformatics and theology in the context of techno-ethics and society.

The Impact Award of ZHAW digital recognizes outstanding contributions through projects and initiatives that are impacting the digital transformation at the ZHAW and/or at the societal level. The price comes with an

With this award, Prof. Stadelmann’s impact at the three levels of teaching, research (exemplary, in the DeepScore/RealScore projects) and building the respective environment for such endeavors to thrive (e.g., co-creation of the ZHAW Datalab, data innovation alliance, and the ZHAW Centre for AI) have been recognized.

The award comes with a cash price of CHF 1’000 that will be used to further enhance the dialog and discussion with fellow scientists. In Absence of Thilo Stadelmann, who was on interdisciplinary speaking assignment, Prof. Frank-Peter Schilling accepted the prize and gave a short address on the kind of impact we a re striving for at the CAI.