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AI location Austria: Top research and talents

12. November 2024

Austria is a dynamic business location for artificial intelligence (AI). A strong research network, targeted funding programmes, an active community and a large talent pool promote the exchange between science, business and society. This makes the country an exciting hub for AI developments and international events such as TED AI.

This positive development is also reflected in the fact that more and more companies are focusing on Austria as a business location. For example, it was announced in October that one of Europe's largest AI software companies will be created in Vienna through the merger of the Austrian Semantic Web Company and the US-Bulgarian firm Ontotext. In the future, the two companies will operate together under the name Graphwise. Customers include the US space agency NASA, the World Bank, the UN and the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim.

Basic research as the foundation for the latest applications

Research into AI has a long tradition in Austria, including the fields of logical systems, neural networks, robotics and speech-understanding systems. The work of the globally recognised AI pioneer Sepp Hochreiter, who conducts research at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU), deserves special mention. In 2019, the JKU launched one of Europe's very first degree programmes in artificial intelligence with more than 400 students. The recently established English-language Master's programme ensures that Austria will continue to produce many AI talents in the future.

Sepp Hochreiter is also one of the co-founders of the start-up NXAI, which is set to become a centre for AI research and product development in the heart of Europe. According to Albert Ortig, Managing Partner and one of the founders of NXAI, this is one of the major opportunities but also challenges: “In Europe, excellent research takes place in Tübingen, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Zurich and Linz. However, we are not always sufficiently successful in converting this excellence into marketable products and leveraging this excellence to open up new markets for Europe.”

Axel Polleres, Head of the Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, also sees enormous future potential in combining basic research and industrial use cases. “Austria has ideal conditions for offering synergies between research and industry thanks to its strong SME landscape. However, many companies are unable to set up large research departments and therefore benefit from collaborating with academic institutions,” he emphasises. Polleres himself conducts research into symbolic AI, in particular knowledge graphs, which bring together unstructured and structured data from various sources and make it more accessible.

NXAI focuses on these industrial use cases, as Albert Ortig explains. “We are targeting a niche that many large AI players are unwilling or unable to serve, i.e., industry. This is because modern industrial processes are complex and sometimes difficult. I mean established structures, and this is exactly where it becomes interesting for us. Industry is looking for developments at the edge, in the machine, in the robot, on the conveyor belt, on the drone, in the train or in the car, and wants to reduce engineering time and costs at the same time. Our developments help in both cases.”

Austria as a meeting place for the AI world

It was no coincidence that the first TED event focusing on AI innovation in Europe took place in Austria. For three days in October, Vienna became the centre of the AI world. Representatives of the most important AI companies such as GitHub, Google DeepMind and Nvidia as well as experts from all over the world came together to discuss the latest developments and the future of AI. At the same time, the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber organised the Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2024 (AAIC), which focused on the practical application of AI solutions in a wide range of areas. ABA attended both events to present Austria as an AI location to international companies.

However, many more exciting conferences on the topic of AI take place in Austria, especially in the field of basic research. Vienna hosted two of the most important international conferences in the field of machine learning in 2023 and one of the largest AI conferences, the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), in 2022. “Austria and Vienna in particular are often more strongly represented on the international research map than is recognised nationally,” Axel Polleres explains.

A strong infrastructure as the basis for future success

Austria is also expanding its AI infrastructure, for example with the new computing cluster at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), specialising in training deep learning models and generative AI. This makes it possible to efficiently process and further develop large amounts of data. ISTA research teams from a wide range of disciplines will benefit from this, in areas ranging from pharmaceutical drug development and materials research to genetics and research into large language models themselves. For example, a research team at ISTA is working on compressing large language models to such an extent that they can be run effectively and display a good performance just on a notebook. In this way, they can be operated more efficiently and with less energy consumption in the future.

ISTA and the Vienna University of Economics and Business are part of the ”Bilateral AI” research cluster of excellence recently presented by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The cluster, operating under the leadership of Sepp Hochreiter, combines the two most important strands of research in the field of artificial intelligence to date, namely sub-symbolic AI (machine learning) and symbolic AI (knowledge representation and reasoning).

“Such large projects can help to achieve a critical mass that attracts further top researchers to Austria and form the basis for an Austrian AI hub. This will create the basis for an ecosystem built around the results of this cutting-edge research together with the economy. It is also up to the next government to seize the opportunity to set a sustainable strategic course,” says Axel Polleres, emphasising the importance of such initiatives.