In the Cluster of Excellence 3D Matter Made to Order (3DMM2O), we pursue the vision of turning digital blueprints into reality using scalable 3D additive manufacturing. This form of shaping matter, in which one locally adds material rather than subtracting it, has become a powerful tool at the macroscale. Our unique selling point is that we bring this technology towards the molecular scale, to answer previously inaccessible questions in the life and engineering sciences and enable new applications.

Biological materials achieve an exquisite diversity and functionality through just a small number of abundant chemical elements. While engineering materials primarily use specific, often unsustainable, chemical compositions to realize their functions, nature achieves unparalleled functionality through optimized architectures that span multiple length scales. Water, with its ubiquity and unique structural dynamics, plays a pivotal role as a “working fluid” in shaping the properties and functionality of nature’s materials.

The construction sector consumes vast amounts of energy and resources, and is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It also suffers from low productivity and strenuous working conditions, while facing labor shortages and having a severe impact on the environment in terms of waste, noise, and other emissions. To mitigate global warming while still providing people with affordable homes and infrastructure that are resilient to the consequences of climate change, the construction industry requires a disruptive transformation.

In recent years, cyberspace has embraced an ever-larger share of our lives, and the notion of the digital society has become a reality. At the same time, we observe massive qualitative and quantitative shifts in the cybersecurity landscape. The attack surface has expanded dramatically, with adversaries targeting a broad range of entities, including hospitals, government services, higher education institutions, and critical infrastructure. This is further aggravated by the evolution of nation-state attackers pursuing geopolitical goals such as election interference. Finally, the emergence of disruptive technologies like generative AI, quantum computing, and the growing popularity of blockchains and cryptocurrencies further amplifies the digital risks. This dramatic change in the cybersecurity landscape poses a fundamental threat to our society, jeopardizing democratic processes, critical infrastructures, and citizens’ privacy and well-being alike.

CeTI²'s vision is to enable humans and machines to interact in near real time in globally distributed real and virtual environments. The cluster aims to develop innovative technological solutions to global challenges such as pandemics, demographic change, skills shortages, climate change, and geopolitical uncertainties.

Hearing loss, the most common sensory disease, impacts communication, cognition, brain health, social participation, and well-being. As a leading consortium with unmatched interdisciplinary expertise in hearing research, we uncovered the effects of hearing loss on brain and cognition during previous funding phases and developed pioneering biomedical and engineering solutions for personalized hearing care. Although we have substantially advanced hearing loss treatment, we are still far from fully restoring the richness of natural hearing. This is due to a lack of insights into the links between molecular and auditory profiles necessary for causal therapies, and a scarcity of truly transformative technological approaches for rehabilitative treatment of hearing loss. However, with recent developments in genetics, data science, AI and health technologies, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to address these limitations.

The Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Transformative Architecture (IntCDC) aims to lay the methodological foundations for the urgently needed, future-proof and climate-positive transformation of the way buildings are designed and constructed. Based on interdisciplinary and integrative research, IntCDC seeks to harness the full potential of digital technologies to address the severe environmental, economic and social challenges that the building sector is facing. To do so, IntCDC bundles the internationally recognised competencies of the University of Stuttgart, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Bauhaus Earth across the fields of architecture, structural engineering, building physics and engineering geodesy, manufacturing and systems engineering, computer science and robotics, social sciences, humanities and economics.

The vision of the Internet of Production (IoP) is to enable a new level of crossdomain collaboration by providing semantically adequate and context-aware data from production, development and usage in real-time, on an adequate level of granularity.

The vision of the livMatS-Cluster is to merge the best of two worlds, the biological and the tech-nological realm, to develop living adaptive energy-autonomous Materials Systems.

Machine learning is changing science even more profoundly than we imagined only a few years ago. While it has proven useful in tackling individual, long-standing scientific problems, recent developments suggest even more far-reaching possibilities. Foundation models, trained on vast datasets, provide general purpose representations suitable for a wide range of downstream tasks, and have already revolutionized tasks involving language. Diffusion models allow the generation of samples from complex probability distributions, and modern programming frameworks make it possible to implement scientific theories as part of machine learning workflows. Thus, machine learning is creating new possibilities in nearly all stages of scientific discovery and inquiry. At the same time, machine learning methodologies have obvious shortcomings regarding reliability, robustness, and interpretability, and come with risks, challenges, and blind spots.

PhoenixD, unique in Germany for technical optics, pursues a holistic approach by developing innovative optical systems that integrate hardware and software.

Over the past decade, deep learning (DL) has driven groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence (AI). However, current DL-based AI systems are unreasonable in many ways: (1) They are developed and deployed in unreasonable ways, requiring overly large models, vast amounts of data and computational power, and extensive infrastructure. This has led to a monopoly held by a few large companies with the necessary resources. (2) They struggle with reasoning, handling unfamiliar situations, and nuanced context. They lack commonsense understanding and abstraction capabilities. (3) They do not improve continuously, learn through interactions, or adapt quickly. Instead, they require frequent retraining, resulting in high economic and environmental costs. Such unreasonable learning makes them brittle.

“Responsible Electronics in the Climate Change Era” (REC²) will create disruptive paradigm shifts in the conceptualisation, design, realisation, usage and end-of-life treatment of electronic devices. Our society is dependent on electronics, which are increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives. Electronics are essential for our continued progress, providing solutions to global challenges like climate change. At the same time, electronics are also part of the problem: Their already vast energy needs continue to grow, and their ever-shorter replacement cycles drive enormous consumption.

The Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence (SCIoI)" fundamentally advances our understanding of intelligence, integrate and unify theories, concepts, and insights from existing intelligence-related disciplines, catalyze progress in these disciplines, and - perhaps most importantly - advance our ability to construct intelligent technological artifacts for applications of societal importance.

The cluster "Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Aviation" seeks to establish scientific foundations for the transformation of the air transport system over the next decades.

Since 2019, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence "Data-Integrated Simulation Science (SimTech)" at the University of Stuttgart have been developing a new class of simulation- and data-driven approaches that enhance the applicability and accuracy of simulations, changing the way we conduct science and technology.

The future will be renewable! Shaping a post-fossil era mandates the development of disruptive technologies for the production and use of liquid energy carriers and chemical products as basis for a truly sustainable energy-chemistry nexus within the planetary boundaries. Energyrich molecules harnessing renewable energy jointly with renewable material feedstocks offer an important contribution to the defossilization of the transport sector. This applies especially to long-haul, heavy duty, and non-road applications, which are difficult or even impossible to electrify, yet have significant contributions to the total energy demand. At the same time, energyrich molecules are essential components for a net-zero production of chemicals serving as the foundation for nutrition, health, and prosperity.

The continuous geographic and demographic expansion of humankind has relied on the assumption of essentially unlimited resources and particularly on the massive exploitation of fossil fuels. This has set us on a path toward a rapidly deteriorating environment and an impending age of scarcity, which will challenge the very fundamentals of nearly all production technologies. Accordingly, various research efforts are now focused on achieving a more sustainable, efficient and automated production.