SDU Applied AI and Data Science: research on AI for health and environment

SDU Applied AI and Data Science is a research section at the University of Southern Denmark's Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute (MMMI) on the Odense campus. It became an independent section on 1 January 2020, having grown out of the former unit Embodied Systems for Robotics and Learning. Its stated aim is to combine artificial intelligence, statistical machine learning and data science to improve people's health and protect the environment.

The section applies AI and data science to a range of research questions, from designing and developing high-impact clinical decision support tools to energy engineering. It is linked to the institute's AI & Health focus area, a broad theme with more than 20 projects spread across several sections and centers.

The section will host the Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) on 15-16 June 2026. The conference theme is AI for good, covering innovation, ethics and society.

One recent piece of research from the section concerns privacy. Asking tech companies to delete a user's data is not enough to protect privacy, because the AI models trained on that data retain what they learned from it. That learning must also be unlearned. The SDU researchers say they have found a way to do this without weakening model performance, and describe their algorithm as a potentially important step toward privacy in the age of AI.