IRIS Fall Symposium 2026
The symposium will particularly celebrate the successful conclusion of the project "Reflecting Intelligent Systems for Diversity, Demography, and Democracy“ (IRIS3D) and offer insights into research emerging from our new project "Human-Intelligent Systems Interaction and Teaming“ (HISIT), which was launched earlier this year. Thereby, it will offer broad opportunities to engage with a diverse community of researchers, students, and partners from Cyber Valley as well as ministry representatives.
Registration is now open: https://eveeno.com/irisfallsymposium2026
We kindly request that you register by November 10 to facilitate catering organization. This event is free and open to anyone interested in attending. You are warmly invited to attend as your schedule permits.
Tentative* Program
| 08:30 – 09:00 |
Registration and Coffee |
| 09:00 – 09:30 |
Welcome and Opening Remarks Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab and Prof. Dr. Maria Wirzberger | From IRIS3D to IRIS-HISIT: Strategic Vision |
| 09:30 – 10:15 | Keynote Talk**
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Laura Kunold, Ruhr University Bochum | Human-Centered Design of Socio-Digital Systems (HCD) **Title and abstract coming soon |
| 10:15 – 10:45 |
IRIS3D Research presentation: Dr. Thilo Hagendorff, University of Stuttgart | Independent Research Group in IRIS3D: AI Safety Testing the Safety of AI Systems: Results from Four Years of Research Over the past four years, our group has studied how large language models behave when safety is at stake. This talk presents some of our results, with a focus on shutdown sabotage in AI agents. Our research shows where current AI systems fail and why behavioral testing matters. This work contributes to AI safety, a field that is becoming more important for protecting society from the risks of advanced AI. |
| 10:45 – 11:00 |
Short Coffee Break |
| 11:00 – 11:30 |
IRIS3D Research presentation: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Sindermann, University of Stuttgart | Independent Research Group in IRIS3D: Computational Digital Psychology Computational Digital Psychology - How Intelligent Systems and Individuals Jointly Impact Information Presentation, Its Cognitive Processing, and the Formation of Political Views This talk will present research conducted by the Computational Digital Psychology Team on interactions between individuals and intelligent systems in the online world and their role in shaping and changing political views. The talk will include the presentation of findings on the personalization-polarization hypothesis in the context of algorithmic filtering, alongside studies on political interactions with ChatGPT and individuals’ responses to AI-driven virtual greenfluencers. The presentation concludes by considering the broader implications of this work for understanding formation and changes in political views in digital environments. |
| 11:30 – 12:00 |
IRIS3D Research presentation: Dr. Agnieszka Faleńska, University of Stuttgart | Independent Research Group in IRIS3D: DANIS From Linguistic Diversity to Socially Grounded AI: Four Years of DANIS Research This talk looks back at four years of research by the Diversity-Aware NLP Intelligent Systems (DANIS) group, whose goal is to make language technologies fairer for people who communicate in different ways. We examine how language varies across social groups and contexts, what computational models learn from this variation, and how choices in data and evaluation can shape the patterns we observe. We also investigate how language models construct arguments and adapt their responses, showing that fluent and persuasive language is not necessarily socially appropriate. Drawing on these findings, the talk reflects on what we have learned about linguistic diversity, the limitations of current language technologies, and the challenges of developing systems that respond appropriately to different users and contexts. |
| 12:00 – 12:30 |
Featured IRIS-HISIT Project Presentation: Susanne Hindennach, University of Stuttgart | Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS), Department of Collaborative Artificial Intelligence (CAI) From Disagreement to Data: Tracking Collaboration in Text Annotation for Reproducible Science and Collaborative AI **Title and abstract coming soon |
| 12:30 – 13:30 |
Lunch Break |
| 13:30 – 14:15 | Keynote Talk**
Prof. Dr. Kai Arras, University of Stuttgart | Socially Intelligent Robotics Lab **Title and abstract coming soon |
| 14:15 – 14:45 |
Spotlight Poster Talks |
| 14:45 – 16:15 |
Poster Session (Room: UN34.150) with open coffee bar |
| 16:15 – 17:00 |
Panel Discussion: Human-Intelligent Systems
Moderation: Dr. Franziska Dukatz |
| 17:00 – 17:15 |
Closing Remarks |
| 17:15 – 19:00 |
Celebratory Gathering |
*There might be slight adjustments to the content.
Please register here by November 10 You can find the invitation flyer here
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