White-boxing Artificial Intelligence

The Institute advances basic and applied research in Artificial Intelligence.

Critical analyses and fundamental studies seek novel insights that shape the future of our society. Key areas of research include

• World Simulation – We train in simulators by reinforcement learning or other meta-learning strategies to study climate change models, smart cities, sustainable mobility, fleet management, etc.
• Prediction through Description – We investigate the reliability and interpretability of modern machine learning models. We focus on high impact questions such as predicting patterns in urban traffic or large-scale rainfall, assessing climate change, biomedical image classification, and helping discover new drugs.
• A Theory of AI – We work towards a rigorous understanding of the success of the latest ‘black-box’ algorithms that is also intuitive to humans.

Unique Opportunities

We are building a unique environment of world class researchers and industrial-scale real-world data openly shared with the scientific community. We take a proudly interdisciplinary approach to bring together top talent from complementary fields, combining in-depth domain knowledge in AI, simulation, and geospatial analysis from academia and industry. All our research is open and published. Contact us to contribute and join us. We organize and sponsor scientific visits, research exchanges, multi-month thematic focus programmes, and academic competitions such as Traffic4cast at NeurIPS.

In the Heart of Europe

We work right in the city centre of Vienna, next to a public park, shared bike terminals, metro, and train stations. The airport is just 15 minutes by direct train. Come visit us!

Living and working in Vienna benefits from the outstanding services provided by the city and the state (strong public health service, exemplary public transport, …). There moreover is a wide range of recreation opportunities in easy reach, within the city or in the Vienna Woods, the Burgenland lake district, and the Semmering alpine mountain range. Together with the rich and varied cultural choices on offer, they contribute to the high value of leisure time in Vienna. Residents form a very international community – about two in five of the 1.9 million people living here came from abroad. The outstanding quality of life that attracts people to Vienna is regularly reflected in international studies, which consistently rank Vienna within the top three cities for general quality of life worldwide (Vienna Tourism, Mercer Consulting) and as leading smart city (Roland Berger).

Post-doctoral scientists do not need a work permit in Austria. A residency permit is required but granted automatically for researchers at universities and institutes.