On Tuesday, October 18th 2022, the University Computing Center Leipzig (URZ) was celebrating its 60^th anniversary at the Assembly Hall, University Church of St Paul. As the central IT service, the URZ shall pave the way to digitalization and build the basis for the in 2026 planned Computing Center for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Leipzig.

The ceremony was opened by the Rector of Leipzig University, Prof. Dr Eva Inés Obergfell, with a welcoming speech. She also referred to Leipzig as an attractive location for research, transfer and the application of artificial intelligence and paid tribute to the Humboldt Professorship held by Prof. Sayan Mukherjee at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig. This was followed by greetings from the Prime Minister of the Free State of Saxony, Michael Kretschmer and from Dr. Christian Aegerter, Head of the Main Office of the City of Leipzig. Furthermore, keynote speeches on the topic of “60 Years of the Computing Centre” by Dieter Lehmann, Director of the University Computing Centre and on the topic of “Scientific Computing and AI in Climate and Biodiversity Research” by Prof. Dr. Johannes Quaas Institute of Theoretical Meteorology provided content-related focal points.

In addition to the URZ jubilee, the Kustodie Leipzig prepared the exhibition “Quantensprünge – Von Leibniz zu Qubits” together with the URZ to represent the history of IT development and show art of the decades. The exhibition can be visited from October 20^th to December 20^th 2022 and from January 4^th  until January 28^th 2023 at the Galery of the New Augusteum Leipzig.

ScaDS.AI Dresden Leipzig at the 60th Anniversary of URZ

Among other interesting speeches and lectures at the event, we showcased our topics and presented demonstrators of the Living Lab. By using the ScaDS.AI demonstrator, visitors were able to carry out three different investigations into the borrowing behaviour of Leipzig residents on the underlying real Nextbike dataset from 2018. By selecting a day in the month of August, the rentals of a ten-minute period are displayed on a map in the form of a graph consisting of rental locations, connections and drop-off locations. For the exhibition, the existing Temporal Graph Explorer tool was adapted to provide visitors with low-threshold access to graph data analysis, a field of research of the Chair of Databases at the University of Leipzig and the ScaDS.AI Leipzig centre.