Inauguration Event 29 June 2026, 17:00 CEST

A summer party on artificial relationality, AI literacy, critical student prompting, with snacks and drinks!

Date/Time: 29 June 2026, 17:00 CEST

Location: Helene-Richter-Saal, Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 2, Altes AKH Hof 8

We kindly ask you to register:

Programme

17:00-17:45: Talk by Prof. Dr. Miriam Lind, European University Viadrina
The Social Allure of Generative AI. Linguistic Approaches to Artificial Relationality.Chatbots based on Large Language Models are not only used to formulate emails, provide cooking recipes or generate academic-looking texts, but are increasingly treated as social actors with whom we can enter into all sorts of relationships, from therapeutic to romantic ones. As they produce seemingly meaningful dialogue and empathetic sounding language, they invite the imagination of a caring other behind the screen that humans can develop bonds with and feelings for. This talk examines the linguistic and multimodal practices involved in forming and displaying intimate relationships with artificial others and discusses their role in creating artificial relationality.

17:45-18:30: Podium Discussion “What is AI Literacy? Interdisciplinary perspectives from language, teaching and computation.“
A discussion with:
Prof. Dr. Julia Hüttner, expert on disciplinary literacies and language education, University of Vienna
Dr. Imre Fekete, expert on AI literacy in higher education, Budapest University of Economics and Business
PD Dr. Michael Wiegand, expert on computational linguistics, Digital Philology Group, University of Vienna
Dr. Laura Gandlgruber, Programme Manager for AI in Education and Teaching, University of Vienna

18:30: Student Poster Presentations
Poster presentations on critical prompting experiments of students from the class “Applied Linguistics in the Age of AI”.

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Britta Schneider and her team are looking forward to welcoming you to the event!