NFDIxCS at IJCAI-ECAI 2026 in Bremen
What was on the minds of AI researchers at IJCAI-ECAI 2026? In conversations with NFDIxCS, they talked about who gets to shape the field, where Europe fits in and what it takes to trust the data that AI relies on.
For one week in August, Bremen became a meeting place for the international AIcommunity. From 15 to 21 August 2026, the International Joint Conference onArtificial Intelligence (IJCAI) and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) came together at the Congress Centrum Bremen. Around 2,500 researchers from more than 40 countries attended. It was the first time since 1983 that IJCAI took place in Germany.
The German Informatics Society (GI) and its Chapter for Artificial Intelligence werepart of the organizing comitee. NFDIxCS was present at the GI booth, where aposter introduced the project’s white paper on AI in research data management. Over the week, the team interviewed researchers from leading AI institutions across Germany. The same three questions kept coming up: how people can stayin control of AI systems, what role Europe should play in AI research, and what makes data trustworthy.
The last question is central to NFDIxCS. “AI is bound to the data it was trainedon,” said Muskaan Chopra from the Lamarr Institute in her interview. If researchers cannot tell which version of a data set was used or how it was prepared, they can neither trust nor reproduce the results.
In his interview, published around IJCAI-ECAI, Gereon Rahnfeld, team lead forresearch data at the German Informatics Society (GI), where he is responsible forNFDIxCS, presented the white paper AI in Research Data Management. Based onconversations with experts from the NFDI community, it shows where AI alreadyhelps, for example in creating metadata. It also makes clear that the results still need careful human review.
All interviews from Bremen are available in English on the German Informatics Societys Blog.
