A challenge for swarm robotics: using multiple drones to jointly transport a package

Whenever a package weighing more than a drone needs to be transported to a disaster area, it takes several mini drones to get the job done. Aamna Piracha is researching decentralized formation control and collaborative slung payload transport with multiple UAVs operating as a collective system. She is particularly interested in enabling drone swarms to safely and autonomously maneuver in cluttered and unpredictable environments while carrying rescue packages, such as through collapsed urban areas or narrow streets.

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Filling the ‘third space’ between science and industry/society with professional expertise

The professionalisation of research management has gained importance at Austrian universities in recent years. Third space professionals are situated at the intersection of academia and administration and contribute significantly to the success of research projects. In a bottom-up process (third-party funded), the Control of Networked Systems research group welcomed Barbara Pöcher as its first ever third space professional. Together with colleagues, she has recently published an innovative case study describing her field of work.

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For smarter AI: AI researchers meet for symposium and summer school at the University of Klagenfurt from 7 to 11 July 2025

The University of Klagenfurt will host not one but two major events for researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in early July: A total of 43 doctoral students will work on new approaches at the Summer School run by the Cluster of Excellence ‘BilAI’. At the same time, the university will also serve as venue for AIRoV 2025 AI & Vision, the joint symposium of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASAI) and the Austrian Association for Pattern Recognition (OAGM).

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Smarter recommendation systems that really know what I might need

How do you teach a computer to think? Not just calculating, remembering or combining information – but real, creative, human-like thinking? This is precisely the question that drives Ali Kookani, a doctoral student in the FWF-funded Cluster of Excellence ‘Bilateral AI’. His research focuses on smarter recommendation systems that are significantly better than previous ones at generating suggestions for which film I might want to watch next or which product I might want to buy.

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