Welcome to THK-AI Research Cluster
The central contact point for AI at TH Köln
Latest News
Load-Forecasting Challenge 2026: six weeks, eleven teams, one forecast every day
2026-07-20 – The Live Load-Forecasting Challenge 2026 at TH Köln has crossed the finish line. Since June, eleven student teams submitted a 24-hour forecast of Germany’s national electricity demand every day before midnight, scored automatically the next day against the actual grid load published by the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform. Beyond forecast quality, the challenge focused on open, verifiable research. The winning teams of the two award tracks will be honored soon.
ECiP @ GECCO 2026: Program complete – three international speakers from industrial practice
2026-07-03 – The program of the Evolutionary Computation in Practice (ECiP) track at GECCO 2026 in Costa Rica is complete: Nicolás Álvarez Gil (ArcelorMittal Global R&D, Spain), Ryoki Hamano (CyberAgent AI Lab, Japan), and Alberto Tonda (INRAE / Université Paris-Saclay, France) will speak on 16 July 2026 about evolutionary optimization in industrial practice. Prof. Dr. Thomas Bartz-Beielstein organizes the track together with Daniel Hernández and Francisco Fernandez de Vega.
Members
With more than 20 professors from TH Köln, the THK-AI Research Cluster is one of the largest AI research collaborations at a German university of applied sciences.
Why THK-AI?
Applied AI at scale
THK-AI combines powerful compute infrastructure with interdisciplinary expertise to bring AI from idea to deployable prototype.
Open for collaboration
The cluster supports joint projects between associations, companies, professors, and students from different disciplines.
THK-AI Example Project
The THK-KIplus project (TH Köln – Künstliche Intelligenz plus) was funded from June 2023 to November 2025 under the KI-Nachwuchs@FH programme by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space. The initiative received around EUR 1.3 million in funding and has built one of the most powerful AI-oriented research infrastructures at German universities of applied sciences.
Focus areas
Critical infrastructure
Robust AI methods for autonomous and safety-critical systems.
CAIRNE Gold Member
The THK-AI Research Cluster is a Gold Member of the CAIRNE Research Network (Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe).
CAIRNE is a European non-profit AI community with a human-centred focus. The network connects research institutions, industry, and policy stakeholders to strengthen European AI excellence, collaboration, and digital sovereignty.
Join and connect
If you are looking for collaboration, student projects, or partnerships in applied AI, THK-AI is your central contact point at TH Köln.
Socially interactive AI agents
Socio-empathic AI-based dialogue and hybrid avatars for social innovation.