Keynote Speakers

BIO
Sabine T. Köszegi is Professor of Labour Science and Organisation at the Institute of Management Sciences at TU Wien. Her research lies at the intersection of technology, work and organisation. Since 2017, she has been involved in scientific policy advice, including as a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. She is currently Chair of the Advisory Board for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence of the Austrian UNESCO Commission and a member of the Advisory Board for Artificial Intelligence of the Austrian Federal Government and the AI Advisory Pool of the City of Vienna.

Cognitive Surrender and the Human Condition: On Becoming Superfluous in the Age of AI
Generative AI is widely promoted as an augmentation technology that enhances cognitive performance, accelerates decision-making, and enables more meaningful work. Yet this narrative obscures important trade-offs. Drawing on emerging research on cognitive offloading, this talk critically examines how increasing reliance on AI systems may erode essential human capacities such as critical thinking, judgment, and reflective reasoning. In academic and organizational contexts, the delegation of cognitive tasks to AI risks diminishing individual autonomy while reshaping notions of competence and expertise.The talk further explores the gendered implications of AI adoption, asking whose capabilities are amplified, whose expertise may become devalued, and how AI-mediated environments can reinforce existing inequalities in authority, confidence, and participation. Rather than rejecting AI, the talk argues for a deliberate, human-centered, and gender-sensitive approach that preserves the cognitive and social capacities on which resilient and inclusive institutions depend.

BIO
Frank Neffke is Professor of Economic Transformation and Complexity at the Interdisciplinary Transformation University (IT:U) in Linz, Austria, and a faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna, where he leads the Transforming Economies group. He is also a cofounder of the Growth CoLab at Central European University.
After earning his PhD from Utrecht University, Frank held positions at the Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam and at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he served as Research Director of the Growth Lab.
His research examines how individuals, firms, and regions develop new capabilities, using large-scale data, network science, econometrics, and machine learning. Recent projects span structural transformation and new growth paths in regional economies, the division of labor and teams, the consequences of job displacement, return migration and diaspora networks, and the geography of software development as a window on the global digital labor market.

Rethinking Human Capital
Economic complexity offers a powerful lens on human capital. Rather than treating human capital as a scalar — high or low skill, years of education, years of work experience — it analyzes human capital through the lens of skills, asking how these elementary building blocks relate to one another and how individuals, firms, and regions diversify across them. Rich digital traces now make this view operational, opening up new questions about the labor market and embedding them in a wider transformation in how economies connect workers through networks that leverage large, collective, yet distributed knowledge bases.
This talk illustrates the approach with studies of the global software industry. Drawing on tens of millions of Stack Overflow posts and GitHub commits, we build a fine-grained taxonomy of software tasks, show that real-world jobs demand coherent skill sets, trace how programmers learn through related diversification, and examine how generative AI is reshaping who codes, what they produce, and how unevenly the gains are spread.

BIO
Moritz Simon Geist is a visual artist, researcher, and music producer whose work centers on the intersection of robotics, physical sound, and algorithmic agency. His practice explores the transition from functional mechanical instruments to autonomous entities, examining the materiality, psychological and aesthetic conditions of human-machine interaction.
With a research foundation in semiconductor physics and robotics, Geist deconstructs complex technical systems to investigate material fragility and algorithmic behavior. His artistic evolution has moved from performative kinetic installations towards large-scale autonomous sculptures that utilize artificial intelligence and computer vision to engage with their surroundings.

Automating Empathy: Will We Soon Dance to Robot Bands?
Artist, researcher, and robotic musician Moritz Simon Geist explores why machines can touch us emotionally, what happens when they do, and who actually owns the machines we fall for.
Algorithms are already changing how art and music are created. The next question is what happens on stage. Will avatars and robot bands enter the stage and bring automation to the performing arts? Will we dance to a music act that has no humans in it? And if we will, what does that mean for us?
In this talk Moritz Simon Geist takes the audience on a tour through over a decade of his own work; building machines that play music, from the MR-808 drum machine to recent collaborations with the humanoid robot SOPHIA. Along the way he shows examples from across pop culture and art: Compressorhead, Hatsune Miku, the ABBA Voyage avatar concert, the 2Pac hologram, and the strange TikTok trend of humans putting on uncanny valley makeup.
But the real question is not technical. Anthropomorphism (the attribution of human characteristics to object) is older than technology. We have always projected feelings onto objects before: gods in the clouds, talking animals, naming cars, a Roomba called Frank. Machines that move us are not the problem. The problem is who owns those machines. When forty percent of people use ChatGPT as a therapist, when Replika users wake up to find an update has changed their AI partner overnight, the question stops being philosophical and starts being political.
So: will we dance to robot bands? Probably. The only question is who those bands belong to.