LEISYS 2025 | Speakers
Meet experts from around the world - at Lancaster University in Leipzig or online.
Kristian Kersting
Technical University of Darmstadt / DFKI
Kristian is a Full Professor (W3) at the Computer Science Department of the TU Darmstadt University, Germany. He is the head of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) lab, a member of the Centre for Cognitive Science, a faculty of the ELLIS Unit Darmstadt, and the founding co-director of the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.ai). After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg in 2006, he was with the MIT, Fraunhofer IAIS, the University of Bonn, and the TU Dortmund University. His main research interests are statistical relational artificial intelligence (AI) as well as deep (probabilistic) programming and learning. Kristian has published over 200 peer-reviewed technical papers, co-authored a Springer book on Statistical Relational AI and co-edited a MIT Press book on Probabilistic Lifted Inference. Kristian is a Fellow of several high-impact AI organizations, including AAAI, EurAI, ELLIS and AAIA.
Bettina Könighofer
Technical University Graz
Bettina is assistant professor of Formal Methods and Machine Learning at Graz University of Technology. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of reinforcement learning, formal verification, model checking, and runtime monitoring and enforcement. Bettina's main research question is how to proof correctness for systems that are too complex to be formally verified.
Tobias Ladner
Technical University of Munich
Tobias is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cyber-Physical-Systems Group under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Althoff in 2022. He has received both, his master's degree and his bachelor's degree in Informatics from the Technical University of Munich in 2021 and 2019, respectively. His research interests include AI safety with a focus on the formal verification of neural networks and cyber-physical systems, ensuring that AI systems perform reliably in safety-critical applications. Tobias is the current administrator of the toolbox CORA. He is also a member of the DFG-funded project “Formal Verification of Analog AI Hardware (FAI)“.
Till Mossakowski
Osnabrück University
Till is a professor for knowledge processing in hybrid AI systems at University of Osnabrück, Germany. Previously, he was a professor in Magdeburg and a researcher in Bremen. He has co-designed the distributed ontology, model and specification language DOL, as well as the corresponding Heterogeneous Tool Set. His research interests are logic, knowledge representation, semantics, and neural-symbolic integration, as well as applications in energy network simulation models and chemistry.
Jussi Rasku
Tampere University
Jussi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Vice Head of GPT-lab research group at Tampere University, and Chair of the Smart Technologies Group (University Consortium of Seinäjoki). His research bridges artificial intelligence, machine learning, operations research, and software engineering, with particular emphasis on vehicle routing, meta-optimization, and LLM-based systems automating software engineering. He has authored several works on automatic algorithm configuration and heuristic benchmarking in the context of combinatorial optimization. His recent publications extend into LLM-assisted code generation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent approaches to software creation and maintenance.
