Hanns-Bertin Aderhold

Opening Panel AI/Deeptech at GrowthCon17

Hanns-Bertin Aderhold is founder and managing director of Cobrainer. Growing up on the US east coast, Nanjing (PRC), and in the German Rhein-Ruhr Region he studied Architectural Engineering at Technische Universität München. Hanns later joined 3M’s corporate venturing Unit 3M New Ventures working in the investment fields energy, materials, and software. He founded Cobrainer in 2013, which turned profitable in 2016 and raised a seven-digit investment in early 2017.

The Cobrainer team is building a software system for intelligently tracking, managing, and allocating people’s expertise which is enabling various large and mid-size companies transition to a networked and project-based working mode. Cobrainer is significantly advancing machine-learning-based text processing, concept recognition, classification, and linking and is growing one of Germany’s strongest ML engineering teams.

 

Interview with GrowthCon17, 24 May 17

Where is the top hub for AI in Europe?
Munich, Zurich, London

Is the European ecosystem ready to power this deep tech revolution?
Academically, yes. But a more concerted effort like the manhattan project or OpenAI would be desirable.

Why is speed the blood of artificial intelligence?
Sticking with the metaphor of the human body – a more accurate analogy imho is that data is the blood of artificial intelligence. Further extensions of that metaphor ring also true (i.e. the liver’s job of detoxifying blood – data ‚cleaning‘ is a crucial feature for keeping artificial cognition ‚alive‘)

Why should we not fear artificial intelligence?
We should fear artificial intelligence. Fear makes the engineers and entrepreneurs working on systems of artificial cognition diligent and humble. It helps keep in mind that they are attempting to build and put to use the potentially most impactful tool in the history of humanity.

What is the most important technology change you have seen?
The availability of vast private and public participation in data annotation such as the online alpha go tournaments, re-captcha, google translate correction, Comma Coloring, mechanical turk and many more.