ÖAW AI Winter School 2026

16 Feb 2026, 08:30 → 20 Feb 2026, 18:00 Europe/Zurich

Seminar room 1 + 2 (Campus Akademie, Bäckerstraße 13, 1010 Wien)

Claudius Krause (MBI Vienna (ÖAW))

Welcome to the 5th AI winter school of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Machine Learning Thematic Platform MLA²S, which is held on February 16 – 20, 2026 in Vienna. Here you can find some general information about the event.

The detailed program is currently under construction, but confirmed topics and speakers are already listed under the "Lecturers and Courses" tab.

This time, the winter school is aimed in particular at people who do not yet have in-depth knowledge of ML or AI, but serves to impart basic knowledge, especially for humanities scholars.

The school will be open primarily to people affiliated with or working closely with institutes of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. All levels of seniority are welcome: students (MSc, PhD), PostDocs, faculty and staff. External participants will also be permitted if spaces are available.

Registration will be possible between the end of December 2025 and January 25th, 2026.

The participation fee is 50€.  

The language of the school will be English.

Local organizers:

• Kati Heinrich (IGF)
• Nicki Holighaus (ARI)
• Elisabeth Königshofer (ACDH)
• Claudius Krause (MBI)
• Jan Odstrčilík (IMAFO)
• Claus Trost (ESI)
• Brigitte DeMonte (HEPHY)

Monday 16 February

1 Welcome

Speakers: Dr Claudius Krause (MBI Vienna (ÖAW)), Claus Trost (Erich Schmid Institute of Materials Science of theAustrian Academy of Sciences), Jan Odstrčilík (Institut für Mittelalterforschung, ÖAW), Kati Heinrich (IGF | ÖAW), Nicki Holighaus (Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

2 What is AI? Overview lecture: Part I

regression, classification, generation, language models, etc.

Speaker: Michal Hradiš

14:00 Coffeebreak

3 AI and ML at the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Speaker: Dr Claudius Krause (MBI Vienna (ÖAW))

15:30 Coffeebreak

4 Overview lecture: Part II

LLMs and LLM architecture, transformers, supervised and unsupervised training in more detail

Speaker: Michal Hradiš

Tuesday 17 February

5 Vibe Coding & „Promptotyping”: Part I

Speaker: Christopher Pollin (DH Craft Graz)

10:30 Coffeebreak

6 Vibe Coding & „Promptotyping”: Part II

Speaker: Christopher Pollin (DH Craft Graz)

12:30 Lunchbreak

7 Vibe Coding & „Promptotyping”: Part II

Speaker: Christopher Pollin (DH Craft Graz)

15:30 Coffeebreak

8 Vibe Coding & „Promptotyping”: Part III

Speaker: Christopher Pollin (DH Craft Graz)

Wednesday 18 February

9 Bias in Machine Learning

Speaker: Philip Winter (VRVis)

11:00 Coffeebreak

10 OpenEuroLLM and other developments on AI infrastructures

12:30 Lunchbreak

11 AI Strategy at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

Speaker: Bernd Wachmann (ÖAW)

12 Governing Machines: From Moderation to Alignment

Speaker: Charlotte Spencer-Smith (CMC)

15:45 Coffeebreak

13 AI Policy at the Vienna University

Speaker: Laura Gandlgruber (Vienna University)

19:00 Dinner at Stöckl im Park

Thursday 19 February

14 From idea to final project: Part I - Data & Code Management

Github management, workflows, exercises

Speaker: Stavrina Dimosthenous (University of Manchester)

11:00 Coffeebreak

15 From idea to final project: Part II - Data & Code Management

Github management, workflows, exercises

Speaker: Stavrina Dimosthenous (University of Manchester)

12:30 Lunchbreak

16 From idea to final project: Part III - Data cleaning, reproducability

Speaker: Stavrina Dimosthenous (University of Manchester)

15:30 Coffeebreak

17 Introduction to CLIP

Speaker: Felix Schmitt (ÖAW | CLIP)

Friday 20 February

18 Explainability of Neural Networks in STEM fields

Speaker: Gunnar König

11:00 Coffeebreak

19 Explainability of Neural Networks in STEM fields

Speaker: Moritz Grosse-Wentrup

12:30 Lunchbreak

20 Evaluation and Interpretability of NLP systems

Speaker: Pia Sommerauer (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

15:00 Wrapup & Networking