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© IT:U
date
10/03/2024
author
Gentrit Dibrani

IT:U welcomes founding professors, first meeting focuses on defining strategy and future development

In a crucial step towards shaping its future strategy and development, IT:U Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria brought together its eleven founding professors for the first time on Monday, September 30. This inaugural meeting marks the beginning of an intensive planning phase, with a focus on defining the university’s strategic direction, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovative approaches to teaching and research.

During the Welcome Week, running until October 4, the founding professors, alongside IT:U’s Founding President, Stefanie Lindstaedt and Managing Director, Gabriele Költringer, will work collaboratively to establish the university’s long-term strategy. With the creation of a unique educational model and a commitment to interdisciplinary research, the focus is on building a strong foundation for IT:U’s continued growth and development.

“We have come up with a varied program for this first week to lay a good foundation so that we can get started together with our founding professors after a year of preparation. To this end, everyone will provide insights into their research fields, we will focus on our model of personalized teaching and discuss synergies between the research fields of our founding professors. Working together for the first time on the strategic direction of IT:U is a key part of this”.

Stefanie Lindstaedt, Founding President of IT:U

The declared aim is to open a new chapter in research and teaching together. This week, the entire team will be exploring the unique didactics of the new university of technology, project-based and personalized learning, in an interdisciplinary research context.

“The kick-off event with the new professors was very motivating. The international skills and the international network are an asset for the interdisciplinary university IT:U”.

Claudia von der Linden, Chair of the Founding Convention.

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: 

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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