Jörg Lücke received his doctoral degree from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 2005, where he worked at the Institute for Neuroinformatics.
After his doctoral research, he joined the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, UK, as a senior research fellow. With grants from different funding agencies, Jörg Lücke then established his own lab at the Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2008, and later moved the lab to the TU Berlin. Since 2013, Jörg Lücke has been an associate professor for Machine Learning at Oldenburg University, Germany. In 2021 he received a call from a Bavarian University to become full professor of Theoretical Machine Learning, which he declined to become a full professor at Oldenburg University. In 2025 Jörg Lücke joined the University of Innsbruck as full professor in Computer Science and as head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab.
In his inaugural lecture, Prof Lücke spoke about training Big AI and Smart AI with Big Data and Small Data. He showed that artificial intelligence is a real alternative to human intelligence for the first time and has a major impact on many areas of life. Generative AI in particular has a strong transformative effect, but is mainly based on large amounts of data and powerful hardware that are reaching their limits.
The presentation showed possible solutions: more efficient learning algorithms that can quickly train large models even on smaller computers, as well as more powerful models for situations with little data. Applications will be demonstrated in image, audio and medical data, among others.
Radu Prodan holds an endowed professorship in Edge AI at the Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria, co-funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Land Tirol, Wirtschaftskammer Tirol, Industriellenvereinigung, and 10 local companies.
Between 2018 and 2025, he held a professorship in distributed systems at the University of Klagenfurt. He received his PhD in 2004 from the Vienna University of Technology and his tenure in 2018 from the University of Innsbruck. His research interests include AI methods and tools for performance, optimization, and resource management in distributed and parallel systems. He participated in numerous national and European projects and coordinated three European projects, securing funding of over €7.5 million. He authored over 300 publications and received three IEEE Best Paper Awards.
The title of Prof Prodan's inaugural lecture was "Distribute and Learn 1 Billion". It described the enormous expansion of the digital world: around 6 billion people use the internet, mostly via mobile devices, which generates huge amounts of data every day. Modern hardware such as GPUs and specialised chips enable powerful AI systems that are even better than humans at certain tasks. Even everyday devices now have high computing power for AI applications.
The research presented in the area of Edge AI focuses on distributing AI across many networked, resource-limited devices. Specific industrial projects are addressed, such as the compression of large graph data, compliance with EU AI regulations and the development of distributed AI models for complex reasoning.
We would like to thank Prof Lücke and Prof Radu for their great lectures, as well as Vice Rector for Teaching and Students Janette Walde for coming.