The Symposium
Under the patronage of the presidents of Carnegie Mellon University, Farnam Jahanian and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Jan S. Hesthaven more than 200 guests from around the world—representing politics, research, science, culture, and many other fields—spent a day and a half discussing the challenges of technologies serving humanity.
Browse the topics here, watch videos of the discussions, and get a visual impression of the event:
June 25, 2026, Evening Reception (pictures), Hotel Steigenberger, Baden-Baden
June 26, 2026, Kurhaus Baden-Baden
Agenda of the Symposium (pictures)
| Welcome |
| Alexander Wieland (First Mayor of Baden-Baden) |
| Jan S. Hesthaven (President, KIT) |
| Farnam Jahanian (President, CMU) |
| Alex Waibel (interACT, KIT&CMU) |
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| Speech Processing, Panel (Chair: Dirk Van Compernolle, KU Leuven) |
| Introduction: Joseph Mariani (LISN, CNRS) |
| Sanjeev Khudanpur (Johns Hopkins University) |
| Roger Moore (University of Sheffield) |
| Alex Acero (Zoom) |
| Shinji Watanabe (CMU) |
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| Language Processing and Translation, Panel (Chair: Jan Niehues) |
| Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI) |
| Marcello Federico (Amazon) |
| Satoshi Nakamura (NAIST/CUHKSZ) |
| Mona Diab (CMU, online) |
| Luisa Bentivogli (FBK) |
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| AI - A new Industrial Revolution, Panel (Chair: Michael Beigl) |
| Wolfgang Wahlster (DFKI) |
| Xuedong Huang (Zoom) |
| Feiyu Xu (Board Member of Siemens Energy, ZF and FAZ) |
| Marco Trombetti (Translated) |
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| Robotics, Talks (Chair: Tamim Asfour) |
| Oussama Khatib (Stanford University) |
| Nagin Cox (Space Exploration Robotics) |
| Giorgio Metta (IIT) |
| Manuela Veloso (CMU) |
| Tamim Asfour (KIT) |
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| Prospective: AI - Changing Science and Human Life? (Chair: Alex Waibel) |
| Jakob Uszkoreit (Inceptive) |
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| Afternoon Program (pictures) @ Driving Center Baden and Eventhangar |
| Car racing, Helicopter flights, Discussions, Get together,... |
| Exploration - Oceans, Aviation & Space, Panel (Chair: Alex Waibel) |
| Marco Trombetti (Sailing around the world without GPS) |
| Clayton Eveland (from Bush Pilot to United Airlines) |
| Scott Hourin (tech experimentation) |
| Mark Armstrong (Apollo-11 and Moon Landing) |
| Jack Roosa (Apollo-14 and Future Space Programs) |
| Andrea Ciucci (Vatican) |
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| Spaceship Earth: Mark & Kali Armstrong and The Astrophonics - Humanity is still worth saving |
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| The After Party with THE REAL PUSH |
