Assoc. Prof Christoph SCHOMMER

Christoph Schommer is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Luxembourg since 2003. He is also head of the research group Knowledge Discovery and Mining (MINE) and Head of the focus area AI for Education for the Social Good for the Department of Computer Science.

Prof Schommer is an internationally renowned expert on applications of Artificial Intelligence. Prof Schommer is particularly concerned with the meaningful use of artificial intelligence in a multidisciplinary context. His research work lies at the interface of AI and data science and concerns, for example, the automatic summarisation of texts, chatbot systems that stimulate communication between humans or robots, speech recognition of, for example, Parkinson’s patients, the development of a medical donor (medicine), the use of generative AI for storytelling (history), the recognition of moods in RTL news in Luxembourgish, the question of fairness in the context of the implementation of the EU AI law (Doctoral Programme of Law, Science, and Technology – headed by University of Bologna), and much more.

In terms of collaborations and joint research initiatives, Prof. Schommer work closely with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), for example in the context of individual research contacts and in particular in the Doctoral Training Units “Digital History and Hermeneutics” and “Deep Deep Data Science for Digital History“. He also shares close contacts with the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, for example in the context of “AI For Education”, various research projects in collaboration with the Department of Linguistics or the Industrial Partnership Block Grant project “Collaboration21”, which is being carried out with our industrial partners CISCO and SCRIPT. We are active with the Scienteens Lab as part of the “BECOS – become a computer scientist” project, with the European Investment Bank as part of the “Evaluation of companies” project, as well as with other industry partners such as LIST (Project DASH) and with the universities in Rome, Linz and Seville and Ars Electronica in the fields of Artificial Creativity. Prof. Schommer has supervised and co-supervised almost 40 doctoral candidates and was a member of defence committees in Luxembourg, Bologna, Turin, Berlin and London. He is currently supervising 8 doctoral students and advising 4 doctoral students as a member of the doctoral committee.

Prof Schommer has taught more than 180 courses at the University of Luxembourg (mainly in computer science, but also in mathematics, finance, medicine, philosophy) as well as at the universities of Berlin (FU), Potsdam, Beijing (Tsinghua), Seville and Singapore. His courses cover topics such as “Databases”, “Data Science”, “Knowledge discovery and data mining”, “Information Retrieval”, “Machine learning”, “Natural language processing” and “Applications of Artificial Intelligence”.

Prof Schommer is constantly present in the media, for example in newspapers as a journalist or interview partner, on (live) radio on ‘Radio 100 Komma 7’, on the Internet (‘Lisa Burke Show’, various podcasts) and also on TV (RTL ‘Kloertext’). Prof. Schommer actively and regularly supports events with schools (Girls Days, Chercheurs à l’ecole) and advises institutes (e.g. C2DH, LIST, Script), (SERV, Thomson Reuters, RTL, CISCO, GoodYear, and others) as well as ministries (Economy, Research and Higher Education, as well as Police) and organisations (IFEN, FEDIL, initiatives by UNESCO, IFF). Prof Schommer has co-led projects within the Esch22/AI&Art Pavilion and funded some work at the AI Robolab of the University of Luxembourg.

In collaboration with his colleagues and students, Prof Schommer has received a number of ‘Best Paper Awards’ and nominations.

Prof Schommer is a well-known expert in artificial intelligence. In this context, he is a scientific reviewer for the Dutch Research Council, the German Research Foundation (DFG), Elsevier Journal Series in Computer Science, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Telematics, and others, Leibniz, Springer, IEEE, ACM, among others. He has served as a scientific reviewer for more than 120 conferences, including IJCAI, AAMAS, ACM, CogSci, ECML – to name but a few. Prof. Schommer regularly organises Lecture Series such as the “AI Lecture Series” (2005, 2007, 2012), the “AI4Health Lecture Series” (2019, 2020) as well as the debate series LetsTalk100 (2023) and the AI Café (2024). He is the author of more than 100 scientific papers.

Prof. Schommer studied Computer Science at the University Saarbrücken and Artificial Intelligence at the German Research Center for AI, where he received his diploma in 1993. He then worked for 8 years at IBM Research and Development as an IT architect in global business intelligence service projects. At the same time, he completed his doctorate at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in December 2000 (summa cum laude). Since the founding of the newly established University of Luxembourg, Prof Schommer has worked in the Department of Computer Science.