The institute´s mission is to investigate and develop computational models and algorithms that permit computers to perceive and 'understand' aspects of the external world, where we interpret 'perception' in the widest sense of the word, as the extraction of useful high-level information and knowledge from complex, possibly low-level data (audio, video, images, sensor data, texts, databases, or even the Internet).
Thus, our research and teaching focuses on problems like pattern recognition, knowledge extraction, and data and text mining, with methods from fields like signal processing, statistical pattern recognition and classification, machine learning, and generally Artificial and Computational Intelligence. Our current research has a particular focus on intelligent audio and music processing.