With its forward-looking, innovative activities, the ELTE-Bosch Department of Artificial Intelligence renders the strategic relationship between Hungarian higher education and industrial research and development even more tangible. “We are positive that the cooperation between the most innovative international companies and higher education is of paramount importance for Hungary, as it will allow us to be present in the economic value chain with higher added value. Additionally, the country’s capacity to retain jobs may also grow significantly in the global competition for investment,” said Dr. István Szászi, Representative of the Bosch Group in Hungary and the Adria Region.

As one of Hungary’s largest employers, the Bosch Group Hungary has developed close, long-term professional partnerships with several universities nationwide in recent years. Within the framework of collaboration with Bosch, Hungarian universities can directly take part in the international processes of industrial innovation. Consequently, the academic sector can be engaged even more actively in shaping the technology of the future.

At the ELTE Faculty of Informatics, innovation and the application-oriented approach have been organically integrated into excellent basic research and have become its main catalyst. This provides a solid professional basis for knowledge-intensive companies interested in innovation, such as the Bosch Group, increasing business competitiveness in a rapidly changing technological environment.

“The modernization of universities is one of the key questions of our time, and as a faculty of a historical university, we consider social and economic value creation to be a particularly important mission and responsibility as part of the third-generation research university model. In this framework, our faculty has internationally recognized achievements in innovation. Our research on artificial intelligence with a long tradition, our IT training ranked among the 500 best in the world, and our R&D&I collaborations with the Bosch Group, laid the foundation for the inauguration of the ELTE-Bosch Department of Artificial Intelligence today,” said Dr. Zoltán Horváth, Dean of the ELTE Faculty of Informatics, in his greeting speech.

A future-oriented research base and knowledge centre

Bosch is building complex higher education collaborations in Hungary and other parts of the world, and thus creates an innovation ecosystem that brings mutual benefits to both the company and its university partners. Due to the cooperation between Bosch and ELTE, university students may gain even more relevant and competitive knowledge and innovative business development skills. On the other hand, the research and development work at Bosch also achieves a lot of valuable results, and the artificial intelligence training programmes at ELTE are adapted to the changing industry needs.

Bosch is proud of the fact that the first industrial department of artificial intelligence in Hungary has been launched at ELTE with the active participation of the company. Hungarian higher education as a whole benefits from the knowledge base and research centre created in this way, where the participants will be able to shape the future of science and industry together.

From self-driving cars to industrial robots

The ELTE-Bosch Department of Artificial Intelligence offers internships, scholarships, and doctoral programmes in various fields, including self-driving vehicles, industrial automation, machine vision, and neural networks mapping human brain function. One of the most exciting joint research areas of Bosch and ELTE is the development of Level 4 and 5 self-driving systems, where machine intelligence can take over the safe management of vehicles completely without human supervision and intervention.

Modern university space along with the philosophy of Bosch

Bosch not only provides industrial background and knowledge for the new department but has also contributed to its physical implementation. As a result, in line with the “New Way of Working” approach of Bosch, a modern research environment and a new type of university space have been established on the Danube bank in Lágymányos, Budapest, which are unprecedented in Hungarian higher education. In the renewed, 400-square-metre department, classrooms, flexible research workstations, collaboration space, a workshop room, and a library have been created. The most important aspect of the establishment of a new department site based on the principles of spatial organization formulated by Bosch was to have most of the functions easily accessible in one place, as well as to facilitate cooperation and joined-up thinking among students, teachers, university and industry professionals of research and development.

A unique innovation ecosystem from Bosch

The establishment of the ELTE-Bosch Department of Artificial Intelligence is part of the common strategy of the Bosch Group and ELTE. The company considers Hungarian universities to be important partners not only in the field of engineering and IT training but also in the field of joint research and development.