Our Guests

Kees van Berkel

Kees van Berkel is an Assistant Professor of AI Ethics at the Institute for Logic and Computation at TU Wien. His research and teaching focus intersects at symbolic AI, ethics, and norm systems. It includes the development of logical methods for reasoning with norm codes, the study of explanations in AI, the modelling of conflict-resolution methods for norm and value conflicts, and the logical and philosophical analysis of meta-ethical principles. A shared characteristic of these topics is the interdisciplinarity of the research. Before joining TU Wien in 2024, Kees completed his B.A. in philosophy and M.Sc. in logic at the University of Amsterdam, obtained his Ph.D. in computer science at TU Wien, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the institute of philosophy, Ruhr University Bochum. He is currently a member of the Research Ethics Committee of TU Wien, co-coordinator of the special interest group AI Ethics at the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML) and a key researcher of the FWF-funded Cluster of Excellence Bilateral AI within the research modules Ethical AI Systems and Explainable AI.

Nermina Mumic

Nermina Mumic is CEO & Founder of Legitary, an award winning TU Wien spin-off pioneering transparency in the music industry. Legitary’s patented AI technology is used by labels, publishers and auditors globally to verify streaming royalties and value music IP. Nermina founded Legitary based on her PhD research in Technical Mathematics, where she developed advanced statistical methods for detecting outliers in complex, high-dimensional datasets, laying the foundation for Legitary’s patented core AI.

Alexandra Negoescu

Alexandra Negoescu is an innovation management expert with 10+ years of experience at TU Wien’s Innovation Incubation Center, where she focuses on building the STEM academic entrepreneurial ecosystem and helping TU Wien scientists and engineers assess the business potential of their research projects and, through the incubation program, help them bring their research to society. Her expertise spans research commercialization, deep tech venture building, market validation, and university-industry partnerships, making her a seasoned practitioner of best practices in transforming scientific breakthroughs into market-ready solutions.

Alexander Pretschner

Alexander Pretschner studied computer science at RWTH Aachen and at the University of Kansas where he was a Fulbright grant recipient. After obtaining his doctorate from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), he worked as a senior researcher at ETH Zurich for five years. Within the framework of the Fraunhofer Attract Program he then moved on to head a research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern. Parallel to this he was an adjunct associate professor at TU Kaiserslautern. Before joining TUM as a full professor in 2012, Professor Pretschner was a full professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Prof. Pretschner is the founding director of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation. Since 2016, he has served as scientific director, and since 2019, as a spokesman of the scientific board of fortiss, the Bavarian state research institute for software-intensive systems and services.

Lukas Rippitsch

Lukas Rippitsch, Managing Director of Noctua Science Ventures, Pre-Seed VC for Austrian Research Spin-Offs. He was Co-Founder of two international consulting companies in the field of Data Science and Marketing Tech as well as Co-CEO for an HR Tech Startup that focused on Founder & CLevel Team Performance and Matching.

Marta Sabou

Marta Sabou is a Professor for Information Systems and Business Engineering at the Department for Information Systems and Operations Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien). Prior to this she was an FWF Elise-Richter Fellow at TU Wien. At TU Wien, she lead the Semantic Systems Research Lab which performs foundational and applied research in the area of information systems enabled by semantic (web) technologies. She has also held positions as Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute (Open University, UK), Assistant Professor at the Department of New Media Technology (MODUL University, AT) and Key Expert in Semantic Technologies (Siemens). Her work is situated at the confluence of Semantic Web and Human Computation research areas. She is an accomplished academic (over 100 peer-reviewed papers, h-index 45) and takes an active role in the Semantic Web research community. Marta Sabou is a Key Researcher in the FWF Cluster of Excellence Bilateral AI, and she co-coordinates the WWTF Vienna Doctoral College on Digital Humanism.

Maria Antonia Zahlbruckner

Maria was born in Graz, Austria. Growing up, she was frequently exposed to the construction industry through close family members who owned construction companies. This made studying civil engineering a natural choice for her - one that turned out to be a perfect fit from the very beginning. Maria completed her studies in Innsbruck and Vienna, Austria, as well as in Melbourne, Australia. After graduating, she worked as a structural engineer on international industrial construction projects across the DACH region. During her master’s program, she participated in a research project that ultimately led to the founding of her company. Now, with factorymaker, she and her team are developing a cloud-based design agent for industrial building projects. factorymaker provides engineers, project developers, and building owners with automatically generated designs, supporting informed decision-making for more sustainable and efficient industrial sites.

Abstracts

Alexander Pretschner: Why GenAI won’t Replace Software Engineers

Generating code with LLMs is surprisingly and increasingly powerful, prompting the question if we can expect humans to be out of the loop anytime soon. My answer is no to replacement for professional software engineers (and trivially yes to assistance) – and something in-between for non-professionals writing software. The argument is twofold and relies on two necessary distinctions: that software engineering is not just programming; and that software engineering ranges from writing scripts over implementing websites to building complex interconnected cyber-physical systems. Software is a design artifact that embodies a sequence of many architectural and technical decisions – traditionally taken (hopefully explicitly!) by engineers who understand and design the trade-offs. That is, some human needs to say what they want and which option they prefer – and this crucial notion of “intent” cannot the realm of machines. Secondly, and also depending on the context, software development projects often fail because it is outright impossible to state the requirements upfront. This is also true for the precise criteria to be applied in every individual design decision. Agile software development processes embody that observation into an incremental process where what one wants is fully understood only while the system is built. Engineers are needed to understand and take the decisions! A discussion of the influence of risk classes and productivity gains rounds off the argument.

Workshop

Marta Sabou and Kees van Berkel: Towards Well-Behaved AI Systems: In Search of Alignment

In this workshop, we dive into the discussion of aligning the behavior of AI systems with human values, principles, regulation, and ethics. The goal of the workshop is to understand the status quo in industry and research, identifying requirements, challenges, desirable incentives, and existing solutions. These questions will be addressed from technical, regulatory, and societal perspectives. As pioneered by the Cluster of Excellence Bilateral AI, special focus will be given to discussing new perspectives that integrate symbolic AI and machine learning.

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