News & Highlights

AI Keynote Panel — B&R / ABB WeGrow Day

Keynote panel speaker at B&R Industrial Automation (ABB Group) company-wide "WeGrow Day" in Eggelsberg, alongside CEO Florian Schneeberger. Topics included ROI of AI in industrial automation, physics-informed AI as competitive advantage, and human-in-the-loop risk management.

DIH West Workshop — Agentic AI for Industry

Led the workshop "Bessere Entscheidungen durch agentische KI" at Innovation Salzburg as part of the DIH West programme, targeting SMEs in Western Austria.

S2 #17 | Wie Reinforcement Learning Unternehmen verändert

Künstliche Intelligenz ist längst im Unternehmensalltag angekommen – doch was kommt nach Chatbots? In dieser Folge von EASY cheesy DIGITAL sprechen wir über einen der spannendsten KI-Ansätze der Zukunft: Reinforcement Learning.

Im Gespräch mit Moderator Rudolf Grimm erklärt Dr. Simon Hirländer, wie Algorithmen lernen unter Unsicherheit gute Entscheidungen zu treffen und welches enorme Potenzial darin für Unternehmen liegt.

Dieses Projekt ist eine Initiative des DIH West, finanziert durch das Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Wirtschaft und das Bundesministerium für Klimaschutz, Umwelt, Energie, Mobilität, Innovation und Technologie im Rahmen des FFG Programms „Digital Innovation Hubs in Österreich“. Foto: Benedikt Schemmer.

3rd International RL Bootcamp

Co-organizing the 3rd Reinforcement Learning Bootcamp at Unipark Nonntal, PLUS University Salzburg. New: custom Gym environments for beginner fundamentals (DP, Q-learning, SARSA).

IPAC 2026 — 4 Accepted Contributions

Presenting four works at IPAC 2026 in Deauville, France:

• RL Beyond Greedy Optimisation (Poster, Peer-Reviewed Track) - RL for delayed-consequence regimes in AWAKE.
• Robust Real-Time Optimization of SIS18 Injection (Poster, Light Peer Review) - GP-MPC for robust injection.
• Causal GP-MPC (Poster) - Embedding structure, safety, and online learning.
• Koopman-Stabilised World Models (Poster) - Offline RL using Koopman theory.

HB2025 — Contributed Oral (China)

Contributed oral paper "Geoff Framework for Automated Accelerator Tuning" (FRCAA01) at the 71st ICFA Advanced Beam Dynamics Workshop in Huizhou, China. Key result: SIS18 injection losses reduced from 45% to 15% using first multi-objective/multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization. Published by JACoW.

TEDxSalzburg Salon — "Rethinking Economy"

Invited speaker at the TEDxSalzburg Salon hosted at B&R Industrial Automation (ABB Group) in Eggelsberg, discussing the intersection of AI and economic transformation.

Keynote at zenonIZE 2025

Delivered keynote with Lucas Punzenberger (COPA-DATA) on "Future of AI-driven automation and the path to more intelligent self-learning systems in industry" at zenonIZE 2025 in Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation.

INSPIRE Project - AI in Education

Partner in the INSPIRE project (Intelligent Novel Support for Personalized Instruction and Robust Evaluation in STEM Lessons at Primary School), funded by the State of Salzburg's "AI Research Salzburg 2025" initiative, led by Christina Egger (PH Salzburg).

2nd RL Bootcamp

Co-organizing the 2nd Reinforcement Learning Bootcamp at PLUS University Salzburg. The bootcamp features hands-on workshops on Advanced Policy Gradients, Actor-Critics, and Continuous Control.

Keynote at iDSC'25

Delivered keynote "From Theory to Practice: Reinforcement Learning as the 21st-Century ML Paradigm" at the 6th Interdisciplinary Data Science Conference.

RL4AA Workshop Hamburg — Session Chair

Co-organized the RL for Autonomous Accelerators workshop in Hamburg. Served as Session Chair for Tuesday Session 1 and hosted the closing discussion (polls, word clouds, panel format).

RL4AA 2025 Contributions

Contributions to the Workshop on RL for Autonomous Accelerators:

• [Talk] Reliable Control via Contextual MPC (S. Hirlaender, S. Trausner)
• [Poster] Robust Real-Time Optimization of SIS18 (S. Appel et al.)
• [Poster] Causal GP-MPC (O. Mironova et al.)
• [Poster] Curriculum-Guided PPO (F. Matanza et al.)

🏆 IEEE INDIN'24 — Best Presentation Award

Received the Best Presentation Award at the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN) 2024 for the paper "Comparison of MPC and PPO for a 1-DOF Helicopter System" (G. Schäfer, J. Rehrl, S. Huber, S. Hirlaender).

1st RL Bootcamp

Successfully organized the first Reinforcement Learning Bootcamp at PLUS University with participants from academia and industry.

TEDx Talk — "AI is what we make it"

Delivered TEDx talk on "AI is what we make it" at TEDxSalzburg, discussing the future of artificial intelligence and its societal impact.

Invited Session — SMPS 2024 (Springer)

Invited to organise and present at a special session on "Python-Based Reinforcement Learning on Simulink Models" at the SMPS 2024 (International Conference on Soft Methods in Probability and Statistics), published by Springer.

Invited Colloquium — ScaDS.AI Leipzig

Delivered invited colloquium talk at the ScaDS.AI (Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence) at Universität Leipzig on reinforcement learning for autonomous systems.

RL4AA Workshop Salzburg

Hosted the RL for Autonomous Accelerators workshop in Salzburg, establishing a key platform for international collaboration.