The two lectures on Medical University Day 2025 will focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine. Ulrike Attenberger, Professor of Radiology at MedUni Vienna, and Michael Bronstein, Professor at the University of Oxford and Founding Director of the new Aithyra at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, talked about current developments in artificial intelligence.
2:00 p.m.: Ulrike Attenberger/ MedUni Wien
"Künstliche Intelligenz & menschliche Medizin - Die perfekte Symbiose oder unüberbrückbarer Widerspruch?"
Language of the lecture: German
About Ulrike Attenberger
Ulrike Attenberger completed her doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2006. Five years later, she completed her habilitation in radiology at the Mannheim Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University, making her the youngest habilitation candidate of the German Radiological Society.
In 2019, she became Chair and Director of the Clinic for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at Bonn University Hospital. She has been Professor of Radiology at MedUni Vienna since 2024 and heads the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at MedUni Vienna and Vienna General Hospital. Ulrike Attenberger is regarded as a ‘thought leader’ for digitalisation and AI in the healthcare sector and wants to create ‘a beacon for digital health’ in her role.
3:00 p.m.: Michael Bronstein/ AITHYRA (ÖAW)
„From Euclid to Nobel: biology in the age of AI“
Language of the lecture: English
Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.” This poetic definition comes from the great mathematician Hermann Weyl, credited with laying the foundation of our modern theory of the universe. Symmetry was key in the ancient geometry of Euclid that persisted for two millennia as the only known geometry and also a crucial element of Felix Klein's Erlangen Programme in the late 19th century, which broke the Euclidean monopoly by revolutionising geometry and creating novel branches of mathematics. Today, symmetry comes to our aid in bringing a geometric unification of deep learning. In this lecture, I will present a common mathematical framework, "Geometric deep learning", to study the most successful network architectures, giving a constructive procedure to build future machine learning in a principled way that could be applied in new domains such as biology, medicine, and drug design. I will explore the geometric ideas underpinning the recent successes in protein design that were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and show the current cutting edge of the field.
About Michael Bronstein is the scientific director of AITHYRA. He will bring world-leading expertise in developing novel machine learning technique for biological applications as well as a track record of research commercialization and technological spinoffs and industrial experience. Michael Bronstein is also the DeepMind Professor of AI at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in geometric deep learning, graph neural networks, 3D shape analysis, protein design, non-human species communication. Michael Bronstein was previously Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter, a Professor at Imperial College London and held visiting appointments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. Michael Bronstein received his PhD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in 2007.
AITHYRA Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence aims to develop AI-first approaches to transform biological sciences. This approach will drive a biological revolution in the next decade, ultimately improving human health. AITHYRA will combine the best of academia, industry, and startups, bringing together experts in AI and life sciences. The new institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is based in Vienna, Europe’s Life Science hub, and financially supported by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation. www.oeaw.ac.at/aithyra/