News

There are plenty of concerns and fears when it comes to how communicative AI is appropriated in journalism. To capture these, the project “Journalism: Automating the news and journalistic autonomy” has adopted a familiar tool often used in classrooms: the suggestion box. In this case it is a colourful box into which visitors to re:publica, (…)

On 14 April, ComAI team members Leonie Winterpacht and Sara Skardelly (from the subproject “Health: Caring through ComAI”) took part in the Innovation Forum, organized by the Centre of Innovation at St Monica Trust in Bristol, UK. The annual forum brings together residents, innovators, researchers, and care providers who are interested in the future of (…)

Earlier this year, Sara Skardelly, from the subproject “Health: Caring through ComAI”, spent six weeks as a PhD visitor at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab (ETLab) at Monash University and joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). The visit strengthened her methodological toolkit in visual ethnography and deepened her engagement (…)

On May 5, 2026, Gabriela Molina León visited the ComAI Lecture series. A postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University (Denmark) working at the intersection of information visualization and human-computer interaction, she presented three projects on the role of generative AI in data visualization. The first, Hey Dashboard!, introduced DIANA (Dashboard Interactive Assistant for Navigation and Analysis), (…)

From 23–24 February 2026, Sara Skardelly from the subproject “Health: Caring through ComAI”, took part in “Anticipatory Infrastructures”, a two-day symposium held at Monash University in Melbourne. The event was hosted by the Emerging Technologies Lab (Monash University) and co-organised by the Academy of Mobility Humanities (Konkuk University). The symposium brought together social science, arts (…)

On Thursday, May 21, 2026, the ComAI research group’s Diversity & Gender Equality Working Group launches its new internal Lecture Series with a talk by Katharina Mosene (Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute). Under the title AI, Discrimination & Stereotypes, Mosene examines how communicative AI systems – particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) (…)

On 23rd April 2026, the Graz Sociodigital and Participatory Futures Studio (short: GraSP Futures Studio) was officially opened! This collaborative space for conducting participatory research with a range of social actors aims to imagine and co-create more inclusive and equitable sociodigital futures. It will build sustained engagements with local actors and residents, and in relation (…)

Our project P5  “Journalism: The Automation of News and Journalistic Autonomy” has been featured on the BredowCast, the academic podcast of the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute. Hosted by Kristina Kobrow, Prof. Dr Wiebke Loosen, Antonia Eichenauer and Jonah Wermter discuss findings from their first year of research.   At the heart of the project’s (…)

At the international conference “Creative Communication and Empowerment,” taking place on April 17. and 18. at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ZeMKI Head Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp will deliver a keynote address on the topic of “quiet and loud futuring,” which is also the subject of his book on pioneering communities in relation to media technology (…)

As part of the ComAI Lectures series, communication and media scholar Axel Bruns visited the Bremer Presse-Club on April 7. Bruns, currently a Mercator Fellow at ZeMKI, presented a conceptual framework titled “Revisiting ‘the’ Public Sphere and its algorithmically shaped publics” that fundamentally challenges the classical Habermasian notion of a unified public sphere, replacing it (…)

The sociological research practice on communicative AI and artificial companionship at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, is entering its second semester. In this two-semester bachelor’s course, students investigate a wide range of questions related to AI companions. The course is led by ComAI members Michaela Pfadenhauer, Andrea Heisse, and Marvin Waibel. While the (…)