Helmholtz Benchmark Projects – Call UNLOCK 2025

The Helmholtz Association has a long-standing mission to address grand societal and scientific challenges in domains such as health, energy, climate, aerospace, transport, and materials science. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape scientific discovery, it is crucial to ensure that AI advancements are effectively harnessed to accelerate progress in these fields. One key mechanism for achieving this is through well-designed benchmarking datasets that define AI tasks in Helmholtz-relevant domains, motivating AI researchers to contribute solutions that directly impact scientific progress.

Challenge: The Need for Benchmarking in Reproducible and Trustworthy Science.

Helmholtz is uniquely positioned to address this gap. With vast, high-quality datasets spanning multiple scientific fields, it can pioneer cross-domain and multimodal benchmarks, enabling more comprehensive AI evaluations. By leveraging its data assets, Helmholtz can drive groundbreaking advancements and position itself as a leader in the emerging science of benchmarking - particularly in supporting foundation models designed for multimodal AI. To address this challenge, and to initiate a community of practice for benchmarking, and to support these first systematic benchmarking activities, the Helmholtz Association supports the hyperUNLOCK Initiative (link https://syncandshare.desy.de/index.php/s/dgWyM6yg8SsYSR4) with this first call UNLOCK for benchmarking projects.

With the working group on benchmarking datasets, the incubator Information and Data Science has discussed this topic since 2023. Based on these discussions, the hyperUNLOCK Initiative was formed and produced the underlying concept paper for this call.

The objectives of the call are detailed in the call text below.

The deadline for applications is 30.05.2025. Application via the ProMeta platform, https://ivf.helmholtz.de

Information meeting on the application process; for agenda and registration see https://events.hifis.net/event/2234/

Kontakt
Florian Grötsch florian.groetsch@helmholtz.de