Dr. Mila Oiva: 

I am a Professor of Digital Humanities, with a focus on images and digital objects, in the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen–Nürnberg (FAU), Germany.

I am a Digital Humanist with a PhD in Cultural History. My expertise lies in the computational analysis of audiovisual culture, digital objects, and digital history, with a particular focus on cultural memory and Russian and Polish history. My research examines how knowledge is formed, circulates, and is represented through different media, and how worldviews take shape across time and space. I develop computational approaches that enable the study of these processes at scale and over long temporal horizons.

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My current work focuses on changing representations of the world in digitised historical newsreels. I have analysed visual discourses in Soviet newsreels in the post-Second World War period and led the Kinokroonika project on Estonian newsreel history. Earlier projects include research on the global circulation of news in the nineteenth-century press (OceanicExchanges) and the spread of pseudohistorical content on the Russian-language internet in the 2000s (Pseudohistory). In addition, I have contributed to discussions on best practices for interdisciplinary research in Digital Humanities and have published extensively on Soviet cultural history, particularly Soviet contacts abroad. I co-authored a monograph on Yves Montand’s tour of the Soviet Union. My PhD thesis, “Creation of a Market Place: The Polish Clothing Industry, the Soviet Union, and the Rise of Marketing, 1949–1961” (2017), explored the cultural history of trading practices during the profound cultural transformations of the late 1950s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

From 2024 to 2026, I worked at the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, on the DIGHT-net project on digital cultural heritage. Previously, I was a Senior Research Fellow at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab CUDAN at Tallinn University (2020–2024) and a researcher on the Digital History project within the History of Innovation and Industrialisation (HIIVA) research group at Aalto University (2017–2018). I was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley (2014–2015) and participated in the Culture Analytics long programme at IPAM, UCLA, in spring 2016. I completed my PhD as a member of the Finnish–Russian Network in Russian and Eurasian Studies (FRRESH), hosted by the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki.

Ella Josephine Esque lives and works in Vienna. She is a media artist and director working at the intersection of art and technology. In her practice, fungi, yeasts, bacteria, and neural networks act as equal collaborators. Her work spans sound installation, bio-art, and artistic research in AI. She studied Audiovisual Media Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Peter Weibel, Virgil Widrich, and Thomas Fürstner, graduating with a diploma in Digital Art under Ruth Schnell in 2010.

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Ümit Bas is the founder and CEO of IONO Robotics, an Austrian robotics startup based in Linz. With over 20 years of experience in the technology sector and a background in software engineering, he is focused on bringing humanoid robotics from innovation to real-world industrial applications. Through IONO Robotics, he is developing secure, AI-powered humanoid robots designed to support people in demanding work environments and shape the future of human-robot collaboration.

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DDr. Erich Prem, founder and managing director of eutema GmbH, holds a degree in industrial engineering and management (*Wirtschaftstechnik*) and an MBA from Danube

University Krems. He possesses extensive expertise in the fields of ICT, artificial intelligence, innovation, and digitalization. He has worked as a researcher at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Lab in the United States. He is the author of more than 70 scientific publications.

DDr. Prem has participated in numerous national and international research projects as a researcher or research lead—including over 20 projects under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research program. He served as head of the Information and Communication Technologies department at the Bureau for International Research and Technology Cooperation (BIT) in Vienna, acted as the Austrian expert on the EU’s Information Society Technologies Committee, and served as program manager for the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) program "FIT-IT." Furthermore, DDr. Prem works as an evaluator of IT research projects for the European Commission and serves as managing director of IEA II Beteiligungen GmbH.