Google and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have announced a long-term partnership on research and innovation in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. Google is the first non-European company to become an official “Partner of Excellence” for TUM.

TUM and Google signed a master agreement for joint research projects.  As a “TUM Partner of Excellence”, Google will donate 1 million euros to the TUM University Foundation, primarily to support talented young researchers, said the company in a statement. Google will also invest an additional amount of around 250,000 euros in this initiative over the next three years through its Munich office in the form of direct funding, material resources and personnel.

Among Google’s German locations, Munich is second to Hamburg. The company has its own office in the Bavarian capital since 2006. A new development center, which opened in 2016, already has more than 500 employees. Its main activities include the development of software products for data protection, data security and cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI).

TUM and Google have been engaged in other cooperative activities for years. In the field of augmented reality, for example, a joint team developed ScanComplete, a method for the automatic completion and semantic analysis of 3D scans of enclosed spaces. Google has also been engaged in a research partnership on AI with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence since 2015.

[Image courtesy: TUM]