Peter Knees is Associate Professor and holder of the UNESCO Chair on Digital Humanism at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien. His research interests span artificial intelligence, recommender systems and digital arts, with a special focus on music search, recommendation, and human-centered AI tools for music creation.
Sophie Lecheler is Professor of Communication Science at the University of Vienna. As head of the Political Communication Research Group, her research focuses on technology and politics, digital political journalism, and the impact of emotion on political communication.
Marta Sabou is Professor for Information Systems at WU Wien. In her research, she focuses on creating advanced AI systems for solving tasks with positive societal impact. Her main background is in symbolic AI (knowledge engineering, ontologies, knowledge graphs), human computation, and neurosymbolic systems.
Kaley Burg received her bachelor’s degree in the U.S. in psychology and sociology, before moving to Ireland to complete her MSc in Applied Social Data Science. Her master’s thesis focused on quantifying environmental mentions in local campaign leaflets in UK elections, and identifying causes for variation in campaigns across constituencies. Her PhD project focuses on AI as a Democratic Actor, attempting to explore citizens’ relationship with AI and the implications this has for democratic engagement. She intends to continue to explore her interest in political communication, using advanced quantitative methodology as well as machine learning to do so
Stefan Forster studied mathematics and computer science at TU Wien. His research to date has focused on the design and analysis of voting methods for novel forms of civic participation, such as Participatory Budgeting. In his master’s thesis, he explores how techniques from Computational Social Choice can be applied to select a representative set of comments in discussions, using upvote and downvote data. Going forward, Stefan plans to integrate the argumentative structure of online discussions into this framework and develop better ways to present and visualize them, both for participatory and research purposes.
Hanna Kern completed her Masters in Mathematics (Statistics and Big Data) at the University of Groningen, doing her thesis in correcting for uncalibrated models in decision curve analysis. She also has an interest in Artificial Intelligence and Logic, having completed a Pre-Masters in AI. Currently, Hanna is working on a PhD in the field of Computational Social Choice, with a focus on Participatory Budgeting, at WU Wien.
Lena Pohlmann has an interdisciplinary background with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics, a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Technology from TU Berlin, and research experience in Computer Science. In her PhD, she focuses on the environmental impact of artificial intelligence systems. She will bridge perspectives on AI’s societal implications with technical analysis by incorporating methods from previous research at the Weizenbaum Institute on Third-Party Audits of commercial content moderation algorithms.
Felicia Schmidt is a PhD student at the Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). She completed her Master’s degree in Logic and Computation at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). In her master thesis, she studied bias in Participatory Budgeting. She joined WU Wien in 2024 to continue working within the field of Computational Social Choice (COMSOC), with a focus on Participatory Budgeting and Fair Online Group Decision Making.
Alicia Schwabenbauer is a PhD researcher at WU Wien who holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Informatics and a master’s degree in Software Engineering from TU Wien. The focus of her master’s thesis was on the implementation of a user-centred design for the personalisation of a smart wake-up light system. Within the Doctoral College for Digital Humanism, her research explores the concepts of AI literacy and inclusive user design. She is developing practical frameworks to assess AI literacy at societal and organisational levels, and studying how people interact with AI tools, with the aim of making designs more inclusive and accessible.
Shahrzad Shashaani is a PhD student and project assistant at TU Wien. She holds both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from KNTU, Iran. Her prior research focused on image segmentation for self-driving cars. During her PhD, she worked on the FWF project called “Humans and Recommender Systems – Towards a Mutual Understanding” from October 2023 to January 2025, and is now continuing her research within the doctoral college project “Recommendations Explained: Towards Transparency and Fairness for Various Stakeholders”.
Zeynep holds a BSc in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University and an MSc in European and International Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her Master’s dissertation explored the intersection of gender and populism using a vignette experiment and quantitative methods. Her broader PhD research interests include political behavior and democratic satisfaction.
Hajo G. Boomgaarden (Ph.D., University of Amsterdam) is Professor for Empirical Social Science Methods at the Computational Communication Lab, Department of Communication at University of Vienna. His research interests include the coverage and effects of political information on citizens’ cognitions, attitudes and behaviors in various domains of media and politics, and developments in computational social science methods, in particular automated content analysis techniques.
Agata Ciabattoni is full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien. In 2011, she received the FWF START Prize, Austria’s highest award for early-career researchers. Her work focuses on Logic, a field that offers precision and trust and is at the base of very many applications in different fields. Since classical logic is not suitable for all contexts, her research explores alternative logics and develops corresponding theory and tools. These are applied across diverse areas, including Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Medicine, Mathematics and Legal Reasoning.
Mark Coeckelbergh is full Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Philosophy Department of the University of Vienna, and until recently Vice Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Education. He is also ERA Chair at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and Guest Professor at WASP-HS and University of Uppsala. Previously he was the President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT). His expertise focuses on ethics and technology, in particular robotics and artificial intelligence.
Sarah R. Davies is Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, and Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna. Her work explores the digital as material practice in contexts in which knowledge is produced, transformed, or protested, and is located within qualitative, critical social research. She has previously studied hacker and makerspaces (including in her book Hackerspaces), carried out autoethnographic studies of academic research (discussed in the book Revisiting Reflexivity), and analysed the creation and maintenance of biodata resources (for example described in the article ‘Care, collaboration, and service in academic data work’).
Verena Dorner is Professor for Digital Ecosystems at WU Wien, as well as Head of Institute for Digital Ecosystems, Academic Director of the Master’s Program on Digital Economy and Member of the WU Competence Center for Experimental Research. Her doctorate was awarded by the University of Passau for her dissertation on decision support in project portfolio management. She headed the research group on “Electronic Markets and User Behavior” and the Experimental Lab KD2Lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Her research focuses on the interdependencies between digital (eco-)systems and user behavior: Decision Support & Business Intelligence, E-Commerce & Online User Behavior, Behavioral & Experimental Economics, Recommender Systems and AI.
Walid Fdhila is a Senior Research Scientist at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, and leads the Decentralized Systems Research Group at SBA Research, Austria’s largest COMET center for cybersecurity. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Lorraine, France, in 2012. With key contributions to national and international projects, his research focuses on trust in digital societies, decentralized identity, distributed ledger technologies, and privacy-preserving systems, with the goal of developing secure, censorship-resistant, and user-centric solutions.
Hannes A. Fellner is a historical linguist and digital philologist specializing in the computational and theoretical modeling of language change. Grounded in digital humanities and digital humanism, his research in language ecology investigates the interdependence of linguistic and biological diversity and the threats they face in the context of the metabolic rift of the Capitalocene. Together with Andreas Baumann (University of Vienna) and Julia Neidhardt (TU Wien), he explores the impact of ongoing digitization on global linguistic diversity in the WWTF project Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity.
Gerlinde Fellner-Röhling is Professor of Microeconomics and Digitalization at WU Wien, specializing in strategic interaction, economic decision-making, and digital markets. Her research combines psychological insights with microeconomic theory to study how individuals and groups respond to incentives, institutional settings, and algorithmic decision-making. She uses experimental methods to explore topics such as social preferences, cognitive biases, peer effects, public good provision, and gender differences in economic behavior. A key focus of her work is understanding behavior in strategic situations. Her research contributes to a deeper understanding of how digitalization shapes economic incentives and interactions.
Nikolaus Forgó has studied law in Vienna and Paris. From 2000 to 2017 he was full Professor for Legal Informatics and IT-Law at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover. Since 2017 he is full Professor for Technology Law and Intellectual Property at the University of Vienna and head of the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law. He has substantial teaching and consulting experience in all fields of IT-Law, legal informatics, civil law, legal history and legal theory and has served as data protection officer and CIO of Leibniz University of Hanover for more than 4 years. He now leads the work of the Department on more than twenty third-party funded projects, is one of two expert members of the Data Protection Council of the Republic of Austria, and member of the AI Advisory Board.
Allan Hanbury is Professor for Data Intelligence, head of the Data Science Research Unit, and Faculty Representative (responsible for financial affairs and internationalisation) at the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien. He is also a faculty member of the Complexity Science Hub. His research interests include Data Science and Information Retrieval.
Hossein Kermani is a senior researcher at the Political Communication Research Group of the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the principal investigator of the BeyondCBA project, which is funded by WWTF. Hossein is mixing computational methods with discursive and qualitative methods to investigate digital activism in non-democratic contexts.
Laura Koesten is Assistant Professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE, and affiliated with the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on improving human-data interaction by exploring sensemaking with data and visualizations, data discovery and reuse, as well as the ethical and collaborative aspects of data-centric work. She is the Principal Investigator of the WWTF Digital Humanism project Talking Charts and the recipient of the 2024 Hedy Lamarr Prize awarded by the City of Vienna, Austria. She earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton, UK, in collaboration with the Open Data Institute, London, UK.
Sabine Theresia Köszegi is a Labor Science and Organization Professor at the Institute of Management Sciences at TU Wien and Academic Director of the Executive MBA Innovation, Digitization and Entrepreneurship at the TU Continuing Education Academy. She holds a PhD in Social and Economic Sciences and a venia docendi in Business Administration from the University of Vienna. She is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her research lies at the intersection of technology, work, and organisation and has been published in over 150 peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. In 2020, she was awarded the Käthe-Leichter State Prize for outstanding achievements in gender research. Since 2017, Sabine Theresia Köszegi has also been involved in scientific policy advice as Chair of the Austrian Council for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, and as a member of the Future of Work Working Group of the European think-tank Bruegel. She is chairing the UNESCO Advisory Board on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Austria and is a member of the Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence for the Austrian Government as well as on the AI Advisory Board for the City of Vienna.
Sylvia Kritzinger is Professor of Methods in the Social Sciences at the Department of Government of the University of Vienna. She is one of the principal investigators of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). She acts as Head of the Department of Government, Director of the research network Interdisciplinary Value Research, and runs the digitalization project Digitize! Computational Social Science in the Digital and Social Transformation. Her research focuses on Citizens’ Political Attitudes and Voting Behaviour, Democratic Representation and Political Participation, Voting at 16 and Survey Research. Further information you can find here.
Martina Lindorfer is tenured Associate Professor at TU Wien, which she joined as an Assistant Professor at the end of 2018, as well as a key researcher at SBA Research, the largest information security research center in Austria. She received her PhD from TU Wien in 2016 and spent two years as a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and outreach activities have been recognized with the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award, the ACM CyberW Early Career Award for Women in Cybersecurity Research, as well as the Hedy Lamarr Award for special achievements in the field of modern information technologies from the City of Vienna.
Her research focuses on applied systems security and privacy, with a special interest in automated static and dynamic analysis techniques for the large-scale analysis of applications for malicious behavior, security vulnerabilities, and privacy leaks. Building on her background on malware analysis, she currently focuses on the analysis of mobile apps to enable transparency and accountability in the way they process and share private and sensitive information. For example, some of the techniques she develops help uncover new and unexpected ways in which apps are violating users’ privacy expectations.
Jan Maly is Assistant Professor at the Department for Data, Process and Knowledge Management of WU Wien as well as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Logic and Computation at TU Wien. He works mostly on computational social choice, logic and knowledge representation. In general, he is interested in studying and developing tools that help people make better decisions, individually or as a group, with a special focus on participatory budgeting and other complex group decision making tasks. Besides his research, he also co-founded the European Digital Democracy network, which brings together academics and practitioners actively working on or with digital democracy in on- and offline events.
Torsten Möller has been Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vienna since 2013, previously at Simon Fraser University (1999–2012). He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and part of Eurographics. His research focuses on visual data analysis, visual literacy, and explainability of algorithms for diverse users. He co-founded the research platform “Data Science @ Uni Vienna” and leads the Visualisation and Data Analysis group. He was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2018–2022) and co- founded the BioVis symposium. His work has received multiple awards, including the IEEE Vis Test-of-Time Award (2024) and Best Paper Awards at IEEE Vis, EuroVis, and IUI. He received the University of Vienna Teaching Award (2016) and two Ars Docendi nominations. As part of Austria’s Future Operations Platform, he advises on digital governance and crisis response. Recent projects include the “Novice-XAI Question Bank” and “MAVIL” survey on visual literacy. He co-developed PLUTO, a tool to assess the public value of data use, grounded in principles of data solidarity.
Julia Neidhardt is Assistant Professor at the Research Unit Data Science at TU Wien Informatics. Her research focuses on user modeling, recommender systems in tourism, e-commerce, and news, online behavior, and Digital Humanism. She leads the Christian Doppler Lab for Recommender Systems and has held the UNESCO Co-Chair on Digital Humanism since 2023. Julia was a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and visiting scholar at Northwestern University (USA) and the University of Geneva (Switzerland). She is active in the academic community and serves on the board of the Center for AI and Machine Learning (CAIML).
Barbara Prainsack is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, where she also directs the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS), and leads a Work Programme on Data Solidarity. Her work explores the social, regulatory and ethical dimensions of biomedicine and bioscience, as well as practices and institutions of solidarity in healthcare and beyond. Her latest books are: The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better World (with H. Wagenaar, Policy Press, 2021); and Personalised Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? (New York University Press, 2017). A new monograph on States of Solidarity: How to save a world in peril is under contract with Oxford University Press. Barbara is also a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Committee advising the federal government in Vienna, and Chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies advising the European Commission. She holds an Honorary Professorship at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney and is an affiliate at the Centre for Health, Law, and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) at the University of Oxford.
Emanuel Sallinger is Professor of Scalable Artificial Intelligence and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs at TU Wien. He heads the Knowledge Graph Lab, a WWTF Vienna Research Group. His current main research focus is on Knowledge Graphs, spanning from theory to systems and applications. More broadly, he is interested in scalable data management and AI, with a focus of making such systems more explainable, sustainable and trustworthy. In this program, he is particularly interested in the interdisciplinary connections of AI and other areas of science.
Christina Schamp is a marketing scholar at WU Wien whose research explores the intersection of morality, consumer decision-making, and technology. She integrates behavioral experiments, panel data models, and machine learning-based text and image analysis to investigate how technological advances influence consumer behavior and societal dynamics. Her research has been published in leading journals like the Journal of Marketing Research, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Eugenia Stamboliev is a research fellow and lecturer in philosophy of media and technology at the University of Vienna and a visiting professor at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. She is the co-investigator of a WWTF-funded project titled “Decentralised Trust in Digital Societies” (DTDS, 2025–2027), where she explores concepts and norms of trust in decentralised government technologies such as the European Digital Identity Wallet. Eugenia is also a co-investigator in a GACR-funded project on large language models and democracy (2024–2026) at the Prague University of Economics and Business. Her research interests include AI and media ethics, (dis)trust and bias in AI systems, and the social narratives shaping human–AI relations.
Sebastian Tschiatschek is Associate Professor for Machine Learning at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Vienna. He received his PhD from Graz University of Technology in 2014. After his PhD, he was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and a senior researcher in the machine learning and perception group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He develops (probabilistic) machine learning algorithms for handling structured objects and sequential decision making. His research focuses on expressive models for heterogeneous data and on the impact of uncertainty and its quantification, for instance on sequential decision making and human-machine interaction. His research is published at top venues of machine learning, including the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
Milica Vujovic is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at TU Wien, where she teaches courses on the advanced design of data-informed design and social infrastructure. With an interest in evidence-based design and data-driven design, Milica’s research integrates data science principles in architectural practices through scientific methodologies. Her expertise is gathering, processing, analysing, and visualizing data using contemporary methods and tools.
Annie Waldherr is Professor of Computational Communication Science in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. She specializes in digitized public spheres and computational methods. Together with her team, she analyzes how public issues emerge, from which perspectives they are publicly debated and interpreted, and how these processes have changed under the conditions of digitalization and datafication.
Stefan Woltran is Professor of Foundations of Artificial Intelligence and Co-Founder of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML) at Vienna University of Technology. His research focuses on problems in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning, argumentation, complexity analysis in AI and logic programming. In 2013, he received the prestigious START award from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and he is a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EURAI).
Anna Kuprian holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Aberdeen, with a focus on human–environment relationships. Her background spans academic research, including a postdoctoral position on sociographic journalism at LMU Munich, and programme management, particularly related to international higher education cooperation. As Programme Coordinator at the University of Vienna, she supports the daily operations of the DigHum Doctoral College and promotes interdisciplinary exchange.
