Exner Lectures 2025 & Poster Session

The Exner Lectures 2025 are back! Join us for an exciting lineup of speakers at Palais Eschenbach for a day filled with inspiration and knowledge. Our speakers are experts in their fields, ready to share their insights and spark engaging discussions. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals and expand your horizons. Mark your calendars and get ready for a day of learning and growth at Exner Lectures 2025!

Registration starts at 1.30 pm. Please register on time...

2 pm Welcome Remarks

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2:15 pm

Sepp Hochreiter, 2025 Medalist

'Industrial Artificial Intelligence'

Abstract: Technological revolutions often come in three distinct phases: basic research, scale-up, and industrial application—each characterized by differing degrees of methodological diversity: high in research, low during scaling, and moderate in industrial deployment. Historic breakthroughs such as the steam engine and the Haber-Bosch process exemplify this pattern and their transformative societal impact. A similar trajectory is now evident in the development of modern artificial intelligence (AI).

In the scale-up phase, large language models (LLMs) emerged as the most visible and widely deployed form of AI. While LLMs represent powerful methods for knowledge representation, they have not fundamentally redefined the core of AI itself. This phase was dominated by the transformer architecture. Recently, however, alternative architectures—such as state-space models and recurrent neural networks—have also been successfully scaled. A notable example is the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which has been significantly enhanced to xLSTM. In many language tasks, xLSTM now surpasses transformers in performance. The xLSTM-based model TiRex has set new standards in time series forecasting, outperforming U.S. industry leaders like Amazon, Salesforce, and Google, as well as Chinese competitors such as Alibaba.

We are now entering the third phase: industrial AI, where the focus shifts to adapting and deploying AI systems in real-world, high-impact applications. Time series analysis plays a central role in this phase, enabling intelligent solutions across key domains: predictive maintenance (equipment failure detection), demand forecasting, route and logistics optimization, smart grid energy forecasting, traffic prediction, predictive diagnostics in healthcare, dynamic pricing in retail, algorithmic trading in finance, and automated quality control in manufacturing.

Talks

• Hannah Rüdisser, Helio4cast
• Laura Kovacs, TU Wien
• Karl Kugler, AI:AT

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4 pm Break & drinks

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4:30 pm

POSTER SESSION 2025

We invite students, scientists & any bright head to participate in this year's poster session "Milestones for a future worth living"

Enter your Poster here

The posters should present a clear, actionable idea or approach; a connection to AI is not required.

Submitters will be granted free access to the lectures after submission.

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5:30 pm Announcement of winners poster competition

5:45 pm Closing ceremony, cosy finale

6 pm break

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7 pm

Caution brilliant: was KI wirklich kann…

Panel discussion (in german language)

Künstliche Intelligenz ist kein Zukunftsthema mehr – sie ist längst in der Gegenwart angekommen. Doch was kann KI heute tatsächlich leisten? Wo liegen die Chancen für Ihr Unternehmen, und wo lauern Risiken, die Sie nicht ignorieren dürfen?

In unserer hochkarätig besetzten Panel-Diskussion bringen wir die klügsten Köpfe aus Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Technologie zusammen, um diese Fragen zu beantworten:

• Sepp Hochreiter (JKU, Exner Medaille 2025) ordnet ein: Was ist Hype, was ist Realität?
• Doris Lippert (Microsoft) gibt Einblicke in die neuesten KI-Innovationen und ihre praktische Anwendung.
• Daniel Müller-Gritschneider (TU Wien) erklärt, was technisch heute schon möglich ist – und was noch nicht.
• Gerald Reischel (AT&S) berichtet, wie KI die Produktion und Industrie verändert.
• Alexander Schiebel (Raiffeisen) zeigt, wie KI die Finanzwelt revolutioniert.

KI verändert unser Tun – ob wir wollen oder nicht. Hole Dir Einblicke, Ansätze, Ideen und Visionen, wie die Technologie strategisch genutzt werden kann. Letztlich geht es um Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und Wohlstand.

Sei dabei – und entscheide mit, wie die Zukunft aussieht!

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8:30 pm Closing remarks, photos, apero

9:30pm End