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date
09/23/2024
author
Daniela Scharer

IT:U starts second PhD Program with eleven Founding Professors

As the fall term of 2024 begins, IT:U’s eleven newly appointed founding professors are conducting research at the interface of cutting-edge digital technology and the humanities and natural sciences. At the same time the second PhD program of the new university is launched.

LINZ. With the start of the fall term the second PhD program “Computational X” is launched at IT:U and impressively demonstrates the interdisciplinarity of the new Technical University in Linz (Upper Austria). The research fields of the eleven founding professors range from Neuroscience to Human Computing Interaction, from Natural Language Processing to Geosocial AI.

“With this range of research foci IT:U will start its second PhD program “Computational X” that gives the PhD students the possibility to conduct research at the intersections of disciplines. Our eleven founding professors have been carefully selected with a strong focus on interdisciplinarity and internationality. Together, we are laying the foundation for a new form of university education, not only in Austria but also beyond,” states IT:U’s founding president Stefanie Lindstaedt.

An international, interdisciplinary team of professors

The team of selected professors is characterized by both internationality and interdisciplinarity with experts coming from the USA, Japan, Brazil, the Netherlands and Italy, as well as from Austria and Germany.Their scientific excellence at the interface of computer science and a second scientific discipline as well as experience and enthusiasm for project-based teaching are the pillars of research at IT:U. 

The eleven founding professors are: 

Second PhD Program: Computational X starts

The PhD program Computational X promotes interdisciplinary research facilitating the convergence of natural sciences like biology, social sciences and humanities with computational sciences. The program supports junior researchers in developing their abilities to perform independent scientific research.

PhD students will acquire a comprehensive range of computational skills and methods, ranging from data science to artificial intelligence to robotics, as well as a solid core of 21st century skills. This will empower students to transform their respective disciplines with computational methods and explore frontiers in the digitalization of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Through the interdisciplinary approach, researchers are enabled to develop, implement, and execute innovative solutions to current societal challenges. This contributes to the digital transformation of science, economy, and society.

The first PhD-Program “Digital Transformation in Learning” has been launched in August at IT:U. It has been designed together with Johannes Kepler University Linz and is led by Sebastian Dennerlein, one of the founding professors at IT:U, and Markus Hohenwarter, professor at JKU Linz School of Education. 

The eleven founding professors with their research foci in detail:

Ass. Prof. Sebastian Dennerlein is assistant professor for Learning Science. Before joining the board of founding professors at IT:U, he worked as researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Educational Science and Technologies at the University of Twente (Netherlands) specializing on the impact of Digital Transformation on teaching and learning. Leveraging computational approaches is a cornerstone in his ambition to understand and support learning processes, as well as focusing on ethical reflection practices for the development of responsible AI.

Prof. Christopher Frauenberger is interested in designing digital technologies with and for people within their diverse life worlds. His research takes inspiration from the social sciences, philosophy and design to explore alternative digital futures that are wanted, meaningful and sustainable. The work oscillates between practical applications in real world settings such as care or education and theoretical questions about the nature of our relationship with technologies such as artificial intelligence or robots. Coming from Paris Lodron University Salzburg, he focuses in his research on Human-Computation relationships and their ethical implications at IT:U. 

Prof. Christian Hilbe leads the research group on Game Theory and Evolutionary Dynamics. As applied mathematician he has a strong interest in the dynamics of social behaviour. He uses mathematics, simulations and behavioral experiments to explore human social behaviour. He is particularly interested in understanding what makes people cooperate, how they adapt their strategies over time, and how individual behaviours give rise to collective phenomena such as polarization. Prior to joining IT:U, he has been a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Germany.

Prof. Yufang Hou is researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics. With her background as a research scientist at IBM Research and an adjunct senior lecturer at UKP Lab-TU Darmstadt, she joins IT:U. She leads NLP research group to conduct cutting-edge research in NLP, with a strong focus on large language model (LLM) governance and human-centered NLP applications for education, social sciences, humanities, and scientific discovery. Her research aims to develop robust and trustworthy NLP techniques to improve human-AI and human-human interactions, and to solve real-world problems.

Ass. Prof Nina Hubig joins IT:U as an assistant professor after five years teaching and research at Clemson University in the School of Computing and the Biomedical Data Science Program (US). Her research focuses on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), particularly in the context of healthcare and data science, aiming to improve transparency in AI systems used for critical applications like medical data processing and social network analysis. At IT:U she contributes her huge experience on Explainable Artificial Intelligence.

Ass. Prof. Jie Mei has a PhD in medical neuroscience. Prior to her appointment at IT:U, she was a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. At IT:U Jie will focus in brain-inspired computation and analysis and modelling of neuroscientific data. Her research group studies how the biological brain’s learning can inspire the design of new AI models, and how we can use AI to understand the brain’s physiology and functions. 

Ass. Prof. Daniel Klotz works on the intersection between machine learning and earth science. In his research, done so far at Johannes Kepler University and Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung UFZ (Germany), he focuses on developing and applying data-driven approaches for understanding, describing and reducing environmental risks. Specifically, he and his team study how we can learn and describe the variability and movement of water: When is how much water where? Finding answers to this question is especially important when we have too much or too little water. And, machine learning provides us with an opportunity to get better and more precise predictions.  

Prof. Tiago de Paula Peixoto focuses on Complex Systems and Network Science. At IT:U his research group works at the interface between statistical physics, computational statistics, information theory, and machine learning focusing on the methodological foundation of network science and the study of complex systems. Examples for complex systems are organisms, ecosystems, climates, technological systems, and whole societies. In his research he makes use of mathematics and computation to discover the hidden rules that govern the behaviour of microbes, neurons, diseases, economics and also humans from large amounts of data. He joins IT:U after having been Associate Professor in the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University (CEU), Vienna.

Prof. Bernd Resch is professor für Geosocial AI at IT:U and a visiting scholar at Harvard University (US). With the increasing availability of large, open datasets, ranging from social media posts and real-time news articles to physiological measurements and mobile phone records, entirely new insights into geospatial and social processes can be generated. The Geosocial AI group is a research laboratory focusing on understanding geospatial and social processes through an AI-based analyses of user-generated digital data. This research helps in understanding the spatio-temporal spread of diseases, in identifying the most affected areas after a natural disaster, or in generating insights into democracy-threatening communication on the internet/social media.

Prof. Ben Wagner is professor for Human Rights and Technologies. His focus on the relationship of cutting-edge technologies and human rights includes the governance of social-legal systems and human rights in the context of technologies. His research goal is to create responsible systems to assist human decision-making processes. Ben Wagner also works at TU Delft and Inholland (NL).

Prof. Philipp Wintersberger is professor of Intelligent User Interfaces at IT:U. Intelligence alone doesn’t guarantee effective collaboration — this is true for humans, but also for machines and AI. Effective collaboration requires understanding the dynamics of teamwork and recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of all team members. At the Intelligent User Interfaces Research Group at IT:U, he focuses on developing innovative interaction concepts for AI and computing, ensuring that future digital systems evolve from being mere tools to becoming valuable team players. Philipp Wintersberger has been at the Digital Media Lab, Fachhochschule Oberösterreich (Upper Austria).

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