News (2)

As part of the ComAI Project P1 “Pioneer Communities: Imagining ComAI and its Possible Futures”, Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp has published the article “The Imaginative Landscape of AI: Locating Silicon Valley’s ‘quiet futuring’” in the Media, Culture & Society Journal. The article is open-access and is freely available to everyone. The article’s key arguments are: (…)

Michaela Pfadenhauer (P7) was invited as a guest speaker at the “Health in Society” lecture series at the University of Vienna. In a dialogue-based format, she and sports scientist Assoc. Prof. Barbara Wessner discussed artificial intelligence both from their respective disciplinary perspectives.  With her presentation “Communicative AI in the field of support: AI companion apps (…)

It is not the typical opening question for researchers, but for Jonah Wermter and Antonia Eichenauer from the project “Journalism: Automating the News and journalistic Autonomy”, that was precisely how many interesting conversations began.   At re:publica in Berlin, one of the largest and most important conferences on digital media, politics and society, they set up (…)

As part of their research on AI companions in the personal sphere Michaela Pfadenhauer, Marvin Waibel, and Andrea Heisse are conducting interviews with experts on AI companion apps. The project aims to analyze the communicative form of AI companionship and to examine how it is realized in app design and interaction.  The following interview was (…)

On 21 May 2026, the ComAI research group’s Working Group on Diversity & Gender Equity launched its new internal Lecture Series. The inaugural session featured an input talk by Katharina Mosene from the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) and the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), on AI, discrimination, (…)

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 (…)

Members of the ComAI research unit are organizing a half-day workshop at CUI in Bremen to explore the use of human-like pragmatic cues — such as tone of voice, backchanneling, and conversational repair — in conversational agents across different domains.  As of now, such cues are often blindly mimicked by models rather than being strategically (…)

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) (…)