The Technology behind Artificial Intelligence

Since 2005, the renowned international SEMANTiCS Conference has been dedicated to current developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, data management, and natural language processing. The conference is held in another country every year.

The 21st edition of the European top event took place in Vienna from 3 to 5 September 2025. This year’s conference focused on the question of how semantic technologies and AI grow together for the purposes of ‘factful and trusted AI’. Once more, the St. Pölten UAS was involved as a partner in this leading industry event.

400 Digital Experts from Science, Industry, and the Public Sector

Within the framework of the annual specialist conference, digital experts from the realms of science and industry as well as the public sector come together to engage in exchange on trends and innovations. This year, more than 400 attendants enjoyed a comprehensive programme of keynotes, workshops, expert lectures, and side events from science and industry.

“I am very glad that the SEMANTiCS Conference 2025 took place in Vienna once more and that we, the St. Pölten UAS, were part of this top-class specialist event. This year’s focus was on the intersection of large language models and knowledge graphs which have great potential for the quality assurance of AI-generated content and will become an integral component of trustworthy AI systems in the future”, says Tassilo Pellegrini, Co-Head of the Institute for Innovation Systems at the St. Pölten UAS and co-founder of the SEMANTiCS Conference.

Another focus of the conference was on the use of semantic technologies for sustainability management and for supporting the transition to a circular economy. Application areas such as the creation of digital twins, the digital product passport, and the management of ESG data (Environment, Social, Governance) took centre stage here.

Top-Level Keynote Speakers

International keynote speakers stressed this topic’s relevance for science and industry. Lectures were held by:

• Georg Gottlob (University of Calabria): Renowned computer scientist and successful founder of several AI start-ups that have productively introduced semantics to the industry.
• Heng Ji (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign): Globally acclaimed pioneer for multimodal, multilingual information processing and knowledge-based large language models.
• Felix Sasaki (SAP): Chief Expert at SAP who designs practically relevant semantic solutions for companies worldwide.
• Michael Färber (ScaDS.AI, TU Dresden): Expert for explainable AI and semantic technologies who advances data-driven innovation in science using large language models and knowledge graphs.

Conference Chair Sahar Vahdati, Professor at the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology Hannover, concludes with an outlook to the future: “SEMANTiCS is a unique event where science and industry meet at eye level. We are looking forward to hosting this successful format in Belgium for the first time in September 2026.”

The Institute for Innovation Systems at the St. Pölten UAS’ Department of Digital Business & Innovation has been a partner and co-organiser of the conference for many years. It was represented in this capacity by Head of Institute Tassilo Pellegrini and Researcher Giray Havur.

SEMANTiCS 2025

• Conference webpage
• LinkedIn group

#semanticsconf