Speakers
Raphaël Millière
Department of Philosophy
Macquarie University in Sydney
AUSTRALIA
Raphaël Millière is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Previously, he was the 2020 Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. He completed his DPhil (PhD) in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His interests lie mainly within the philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and mind.
He is particularly interested in gaining a better understanding of modern artificial neural networks based on deep learning architectures, such as large language models. Assessing the capacities and limitations of these models is a challenging and interdisciplinary endeavor. He believes philosophy can provide important insights to establish fair and meaningful comparisons between machines and humans in various domains, including language processing and reasoning. In return, studying artificial neural networks might inform theorizing about human cognition.
He is also interested in the nature and scope of self-representation; ethical and safety issues related to the development and deployment of AI; issues related to the relationship between art and technology; issues related to the conceptualization and taxonomy of global states of consciousness, such as post-comatose disorders of consciousness and drug-induced states; and methodological issues regarding the use of first-person reports in neuroscience.
Dimitri Coelho Mollo
Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Umeå University
SWEDEN
Dimitri Coelho Mollo is an Assistant Professor with focus in Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, at Umeå University, Sweden. In addition, he is focus area coordinator at TAIGA (Centre for Transdisciplinary AI), for the area 'Understanding and Explaining Artificial Intelligence', and was a member of AI Sweden's interdisciplinary expert pool for Natural Language Understanding. He is also an external Principal Investigator at the Science of Intelligence Cluster, in Berlin, Germany.
Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the interuniversity Science of Intelligence Cluster, as well as at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and at the Institut für Philosophie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He was a founding member of the science communication project "CollActive Materials", a collaboration between the Clusters of Excellence Science of Intelligence and Matters of Activity, funded by the Berlin University Alliance. Dimitri Coelho Mollo carried out his PhD studies in Philosophy at King's College London and at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before that, he completed his M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Bologna, as a student of Collegio Superiore
His main areas of research are Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, and Philosophy of Science. He is also interested in the ethics of current and future use of AI systems, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophy of Climate Science. His main focus is on foundational and epistemological issues in Artificial Intelligence and the cognitive sciences, regarding, among others, the concepts of representation, computation, and intelligence.
Anna Dawid
Center of Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute New York
USA
Anna Dawid is a research fellow at the Center of Computational Quantum Physics of the Flatiron Institute in New York, happily playing with interpretable machine learning for science and ultracold molecules for quantum simulations.
She defended her joint Ph.D. degree in physics and photonics in September 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Michał Tomza (Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Poland) and Prof. Maciej Lewenstein (ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain). Before, she did her MSc in quantum chemistry and BSc in Biotechnology at the University of Warsaw.
David W. Hogg
Department of Physics
New York University
USA
David W. Hogg's main research interests are in observational cosmology, especially approaches that use galaxies to infer the physical properties of the Universe. He also works on the properties and kinematics of stars in the Galaxy, and the measurement and discovery of planets around other stars. In all areas, he is interested in developing the engineering systems that make these projects possible, for his group and for the astrophysics community as a whole. His research is or has been recently supported by New York University, NASA, the NSF, the Moore Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Max Planck Society, the Humboldt Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Simons Foundation.
Hogg is working towards several comprehensive projects in observational astrophysics, including the measurement and simultaneous analysis of every galaxy (above some mass) in the observable Universe, every star (above some brightness) in our Galaxy, or every image (above some quality) taken by any astronomical camera. The comprehensive goals are long-term goals, but he is involved in present-day projects that work towards them, including Astrometry.net, Gaia, and SDSS.
Jana Lasser
IdeA Lab
University of Graz
AUSTRIA
Jana Lasser is a Professor for Data Analysis at University of Graz and lead the research group of Complex Social & Computational Systems at the interdisciplinary center IDea_Lab. She is also Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.
She researches emergent phenomena in complex social systems, employing methods from machine learning, data science, natural language processing and computational and statistical modelling to understand how humans behave in socio-technical environments. Her current research interests include the effectiveness of counterspeech strategies and the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, the fracturing or our society's understanding of "honesty" and the impact of social media recommendation algorithms on societal outcomes.
For her PhD in physics, she conducted research on pattern formation in salt deserts at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and received her degree from the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany in 2019. After a PostDoc at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, a stay at the Graz University of Technology as Marie Curie Fellow, and a short stint at RWTH Aachen as interim professor for Computational Social Sciences and Humanities, she joined the University of Graz in 2024.
Next to her research she cares deeply about scientific integrity and how the scientific community functions and dysfunctions in this context. She improves reproducibility and transparency of research by being an outspoken and active proponent of Open Science practices. As leader of the survey group within the COST Action on Researcher Mental Health and founding member of the Network Against Abuse of Power in Science she drives systemic change to improve the conditions under which science is conducted.
Martin Holler
Department of Mathematics and Scientific Computing
University of Graz
AUSTRIA
Martin Holler is associate professor at the Department of Mathematics and Scientific Computing and Head of the research group Mathematics of Data science at the University of Graz. His research interests include Mathematics of data science and machine learning, generative models in machine learning, variational methods in imaging, dynamic and multi-modality inverse problems, model-based regularization, biomedical imaging, image and video decompression.
The Research group "Mathematics of Data Science" works at the interface of data science, machine learning, inverse problems and image processing. Within these fields, their research is characterized by a close connection of the development and analysis of mathematical models in function space with concrete, interdisciplinary applications.
Their main directions of research are variational methods for dynamic and multi-channel inverse problems as well as generative models in machine learning. The contributions of their work are both of mathematical nature, comprising novel mathematical models in function space, and strongly application-driven, comprising the implementation and publication of parallelized algorithms and software tools for dealing with real-world data.
Kerstin Lenk
Institute of Neural Engineering
Graz University of Technology
AUSTRIA
Kerstin Lenk is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Neural Engineering at Graz University of Technology since April 2021. She and her group are interested in computational modeling and analyzing the ion and neurotransmitter signalling of single astrocytes and neuron-astrocyte networks. They perform electrophysiological experiments in vitro on neurons and astrocytes to derive parameters for the computational models. Moreover, they investigate RNA-Seq data from hPSC derived neurons and astrocytes.
During her Ph.D., she developed a neuronal network model that simulates the activity of up to 10,000 neurons. One focus was to model the influence of neuroactive substances, for example, antiepileptic drugs, on the neuronal synapses and thus to be able to draw conclusions about the connections between neurons in the network. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) in Computer Science at Clausthal University of Technology, Germany.
In December 2016, she started her first Postdoctoral position at the TU Dresden, Germany. There, she analyzed transcriptomic data of human stem cell-derived neurons with bioinformatics tools. In 2018, she was granted a prestigious position as a Postdoctoral Researcher by the Academy of Finland. At Tampere University (TUNI, former TUT) in Finland, she started to develop computational models of local calcium dynamics in human single-cell astrocytes and neuron-astrocyte networks.
https://www.tugraz.at/institute/ine/research/team-lenk
https://www.tu-clausthal.de/
https://tu-dresden.de/cmcb/crtd?set_language=en
https://research.tuni.fi/cbig/
Jordi Vallverdú
Deparment of Philosophy
ICREA / Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
SPAIN
Jordi Vallverdú, Ph.D., M.Sci., B.Mus, B.Phil (Full Prof. accredited) is a Catalan investigator who has devoted his research to the cognitive and epistemic aspects of the Philosophy of Computing, Philosophy of Sciences, Cognition, and Philosophy of AI. After his Bachelor in Philosophy at U. Barcelona (1996), he obtained his M.Sci and Ph.D. at U. Autònoma de Barcelona (2001, 2002, respectively). He also obtained his Bachelor's in Music (ESMUC, 2011). He has had research stays at the Glaxo-Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (1997), J.F.K. School at Harvard University (2000), and Nishidalab at Kyoto University (2011, under a JSPS Grant). He has been visiting professor at Technische Universität München, and the University of Reading, and has been invited by a large number of institutions to lecture and teach specialized seminars. In 2019 won the Best presentation award at the HUAWEI Neuro-inspired, cognitive, and unconventional computing workshop, Kazan (Russia).
Professor Vallverdú's research has been exploring two main related areas: epistemology and cognition. Since his early Ph.D. research on epistemic controversies, Prof. Vallverdú has analyzed several aspects of computational epistemology.
His latest research has been focused on the Causal challenges of Machine Learning techniques, with special emphasis on Deep Learning. As one of the most promising advances, Statistics meets Causal graph reasoning (via Directed Acyclic Graphs), with several conceptual paths still to be explored and clearly identified. Counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental part of these open debates, which are under the analysis of Prof. Vallverdú.
Philipp Berghofer is a Post-Doc researcher and lecturer at the Philosophy Department of the University of Graz, Austria. He received his PhD at the University of Graz in June 2019 and he has a Bachelor’s degree in physics. He is the president of the Austrian Society for Phenomenology, the book review editor of Husserl Studies, a former visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the author of The Justificatory Force of Experiences (Springer, 2022), a co-author of Gauge Symmetries, Symmetry Breaking, and Gauge-Invariant Approaches (CUP, 2023), and the co-editor of Phenomenological Approaches to Physics (Springer, 2020) and Phenomenology and QBism (Routledge, 2023). He was the principal investigator of the research project: “Quantum Mechanics and Phenomenology: Specifying the Philosophical Foundations of QBism” (granted by the Styrian Research Council) and he is currently the principal investigator of the research project “The Ontology and Future of Gauge Theories” (granted by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF).
Philipp Berghofer is a philosopher working in epistemology, philosophy of physics, and phenomenology. In epistemology, he is mainly interested in the structure and nature of epistemic justification. He believes that experiences, understood in a broad sense, are a source of immediate justification as well as our ultimate justifiers such that every piece of knowledge can be traced back to epistemically foundational experiences. He argues that the justificatory force of experiences is determined by their phenomenology. In philosophy of physics, he mainly focuses on experience-centered interpretations of quantum mechanics, the program of reconstructing quantum mechanics based on operationally meaningful principles, and the ontological status and methodological function of gauge symmetries. With regard to the latter, he is working on gauge-invariant approaches to (particle) physics.
Georg Vogeler
Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities
University of Graz
AUSTRIA
Georg Vogeler is professor for Digital Humanities at the Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung at Graz University. He trained in Medieval History, and in particular Historical Auxiliary Sciences, under the supervision of Walter Koch, Walter Jaroschka, and Knut Görich, pursuing his studies in Freiburg and Munich.
His academic career has taken him to Munich, Lecce, Venice, Vienna and Graz. His expertise lies in late medieval administrative history, high medieval cultural history, and diplomatics. He was an early adopter of the application of digital methods in these fields of study. In 2021, he won an ERC Advanced Grant on Digital Diplomatics (https://didip.eu).
In the Digital Humanities his research interest lies in Digital Scholarly Editing, Semantic Web technologies, Data Modelling, and application of Data Science to the Humanities. He is a founding member of the Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (IDE, https://www.i-d-e.de) and leads two national DH projects in Austria (https://ditah.at, https://dhinfra.at)
Eugenia Stamboliev
Philosophy of Media and Technology
University of Vienna
AUSTRIA
Eugenia Stamboliev is an Austro-Bulgarian media scholar and philosopher of technology holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna. She received her PhD in Transdisciplinary Studies, specialised on ethics of media and technology, part of a Marie-Curie ITN 'CogNovo' at Plymouth University, United Kingdom. Before that she received a diploma (BA and MA) in Media and Communication Studies at University of Arts Berlin, Germany. She also completed Doctoral courses in PACT (Philosophy, Art & Critical Theory) at the European Graduate School in 2014 in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a Vordiplom in Law Studies at the Free University Berlin, Germany.
She works on ethical issues around artificial intelligence and algorithmic/data structures while studying political, socioeconomic, and normative concerns. Her project Interpretability and Explainability as Drivers to Democracy focuses on the influence of complex algorithmic structures (like covid models) and democratic concepts and examines conceptual shifts in institutional power, social trust and explainability (XAI).
From 2024 to 2027, she is affiliated with the Prague University of Economics and Business as a co-PI in a project exploring the role of Large Language Models in democracy (funded by the Czech Science Foundation, in collaboration with assistent professor Petr Specián and associate professor Miroslav Vacura). In 2022/2023, she held a visiting fellowship at the Philosophy Department at Tilburg University (NL), exploring the concept of trustworthiness in EU policy (in collaboration with assistant professor Tim Christiaens).
She published, among others, on a post-critical AI literacy; algorithmic uncanniness of health applications; care robots, tracking and performative ethics; care robots on the theatre stage; the philosophy of screen bodies through the work of Flusser and Münsterberg; and on visual narratives of refugee camp life in documentary film. She is involved in the European research project on personalised robotics PERSEO, and is a mentee in the postdoc:muv program at the University of Vienna. She acts as a reviewer for various national and international forums, like the TU Wien Academic Press and the Czech Science Foundation while also teaching courses on Data and AI ethics.
Harald Wiltsche
Department of Culture and Society (IKOS)
Division of Philosophy and Applied Ethics (FTE)
Linköping University
SWEDEN
Harald Wiltsche is a Full Professor and Head of Research at Linköping University, Sweden. Prior to that he was Assistant Professor at the University of Graz, Austria, Recurring Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.
He received his Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Graz, Austria, in 2008. He had a 2-year research scholarship from the University of Graz and a 3-year full scholarship from the Austrian Science Fund to write his dissertation. After that he was awarded a Erwin-Schroedinger-Scholarship to continue his research at the University of Toronto, Canada, under the supervision of James Robert Brown.
Harald Wiltsche is a phenomenologist of science. What interests him is how bodily, socially and historically situated subjects gain knowledge about the world by relying on means as diverse as thought experiments, models or scientific instruments. He has published widely in phenomenology, general philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, and serves currently as the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Phenomenology of Science.
Tima Otu Anwana is a South African educated research associate. In 2019 she received an LLM in International Business Law from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She is characterised by an enthusiasm to ensure the evolution and development of the legal order in the face of increasing technological advancements, especially on the African continent. Her research/academic interests focus on Business and Technology Law, Innovation and Policy.
Credit: Elmar Gubisch
Elisabeth Hödl is a Practice Professor of IT-Law at KFU-Graz, with a diverse and accomplished career path that blends legal expertise with innovation and creativity. She began her academic journey as an Assistant for Public Law at KFU-Graz, later expanding her experience by working in the European Parliament. She then transitioned to a prominent law firm specializing in business law, where she honed her legal skills further.
Elisabeth's career took a significant turn when she became the Chief Scientific Officer of a data consulting company, where she led scientific initiatives in the realm of data and technology. Driven by her passion for innovation and the future of digitalization, she founded Ubifacts, a consulting firm dedicated to exploring and developing future concepts in a digitalized world. Her innovative spirit also led her to contribute to the Styria Media Group AG, where she worked on forward-thinking projects.
In her teaching, Elisabeth is known for her unique approach, combining her extensive knowledge of IT law with creative methodologies. She actively engages in creative writing processes and visual arts, bringing an artistic dimension to her educational practices, making her courses both intellectually stimulating and creatively enriching.
Benjamin Roth
Faculty of Computer Science and Faculty of & Philological and Cultural Studies
University of Vienna
AUSTRIA
Benjamin Roth is a professor in the area of deep learning & statistical NLP, leading the WWTF Vienna Research Group for Young Investigators "Knowledge-Infused Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing". Prior to this, he was an interim professor at LMU Munich. He obtained his PhD from Saarland University and did a postdoc at UMass, Amherst. His research interests are the extraction of knowledge from text with statistical methods and knowledge-supervised learning.
Ken Archer
Responsible AI at Microsoft
San Francisco, California
USA
Ken Archer is a principal in Responsible AI at Microsoft and previously led Responsible AI at Twitch. He is a PhD researcher in philosophy at Linkoping University in Sweden, having received his MA in philosophy from Catholic University of America under Robert Sokolowski with a thesis on “Bolzano’s Theory of Science”, and studied undergraduate philosophy at Tufts. His research, which currently focuses on deepening our understanding of probability and of AI through phenomenology, is available at http://www.kenarcher.org.
Moritz Grosse-Wentrup
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Vienna
AUSTRIA
Moritz Grosse-Wentrup develops (interpretable) machine learning and AI algorithms that provide insight into how large-scale neuronal activity gives rise to (disorders of) cognition. He applies these algorithms in the field of cognitive neural engineering, for example, to create brain-AI interfaces that facilitate communication with cognitively impaired patients. Currently, his primary interest is the development of algorithms that learn from large-scale neuronal recordings how neuronal dynamics on low-dimensional manifolds realize computations.