Following the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, those who understand, can do something right. With this he describes quite aptly the common imagination of how an agent should act intelligently. Understanding presupposes in general the presence of relevant knowledge structures through which a substantive understanding of textual or visual perceptions, matters, situations or interrelationships becomes possible in the first place. Facilitating understanding is one of the key challenges of todays's AI research; to implement understanding in a suitable way as a basis for intelligently acting agents is another one. The main focus of this professorship are topics concerning machine learning and deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision, knowledge engineering, decision making and autonomous systems.