Hamburg’s First Mayor Peter Tschentscher Visits the Cluster of Excellence RAI
On Friday, 16 January 2026, TU President Professor Tanja Brühl welcomed the First Mayor of Hamburg, Dr Peter Tschentscher, to hessian.AI’s headquarters in Darmstadt. Together with Bijan Kaffenberger, member of the Hessian State Parliament, Tschentscher was the first guest of the Cluster of Excellence Reasonable Artificial Intelligence (RAI). The Cluster is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as one of 70 clusters since 1 January.
The co-spokespersons of RAI, Professor Kristian Kersting (Co-Director of hessian.AI) and Professor Marcus Rohrbach, presented the cluster’s vision in an engaging manner. Researchers at RAI work in multidisciplinary teams on developing a new generation of artificial intelligence. This new form of AI will learn in a more “reasonable” way, continuously improve, build abstract knowledge about the world, and possess an intuitive ability to think, interact, and adapt to its environment.
AI models developed within RAI are trained in a decentralised manner, aiming to use compute resources efficiently. In a live demonstration presented by Professor Simone Schaub-Meyer and Simon Kiefhaber, the guests experienced an initial application of this vision: by optimising algorithms for machine vision, movements can be detected in real time, providing users with immediate and intuitive feedback on direction and speed.
Dr Tschentscher expressed his appreciation for the work of the researchers and emphasised its significance for both practical users and political decision-makers—particularly in addressing questions around the ethically responsible use of artificial intelligence to support work processes.
About RAI
At the beginning of 2026, two new Clusters of Excellence were established at TU Darmstadt in cooperation with hessian.AI: Reasonable Artificial Intelligence (RAI) and The Adaptive Mind (TAM). They represent outstanding interdisciplinary research into the future of responsible AI and into a deeper understanding of human cognition.
Text: Ane Schäfer
Photo: René Wenner
(from left) Prof Simone Schaub-Meyer, Prof Kristian Kersting, Wolfgang Heenes, First Mayor Dr Peter Tschentscher, Prof Marcus Rohrbach, TU President Prof Tanja Brühl, Bijan Kaffenberger, Simon Brockhaus, Prof Stefan Roth, Simon Kiefhaber.
