Georg Rehm

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

Prof. Dr. Georg Rehm works as a Principal Researcher in the Speech and Language Technology Lab at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), in Berlin. He is also an adjunct professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and deputy spokesperson of the DFKI Lab Berlin. Currently, Georg Rehm is the Coordinator of the EU-funded project Language Data Space (LDS; 2023-2025), Co-coordinator of the EU-funded project European Language Equality (ELE and ELE2; 2021-2022 and 2022-2023) and involved, as a principal investigator, in the projects OpenGPT-X (BMWK, 2022-2024), DataBri-X (EU, 2022-2025), SciLake (EU, 2023-2025) and NFDI4DS (DFG, 2021-2026). Since 2013, Georg Rehm has been the Head of the German/Austrian Chapter of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), hosted at DFKI in Berlin. Also related to ICT and standardisation, Georg Rehm is a member of the DIN strategy group FOCUS.digital. In the 2021/2022 and 2023/2024 terms, Georg Rehm serves as the Secretary of the EACL (European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). Georg Rehm holds an M.A. in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics and Computer Science from the University of Osnabrück. After completing his PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Gießen, he worked at the University of Tübingen, leading projects on the sustainability of language resources and technologies. Georg Rehm has extensive industry experience, leading the language technology development at the award-winning internet startup vionto GmbH (2008-2010) and serving as Head of Research and AI at the company Field 33 GmbH (2022-2023). Georg Rehm has authored, co-authored or edited more than 250 research publications.

Chris Hann

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Prof. Chris Hann was born and brought up in Wales. His university education is from Oxford (BA 1974 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics) and Cambridge (PhD, Social Anthropology, 1979). He stayed on in Cambridge as a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, and was appointed to a lectureship (with tenure) at the Department of Social Anthropology. Between 1992 and joining the Max Planck Society in 1999 he was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Later he became Honorary Professor at Kent, and also at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig.

His main research interests date back to his undergraduate days and his first fieldwork projects in rural Hungary and Poland. He followed up with a comparative investigation of smallholders in a capitalist context on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. His work on religion derives primarily from his encounter with the Greek Catholic minority in Poland, an interest that later expanded to eastern Christians in general. After 2006 he resumed fieldwork in Xinjiang in the form of a contribution to the departmental Focus Group investigating social support and kinship in China and Vietnam. He maintains strong interests in comparative economic organization, in part through collaborative projects with Catherine Alexander, Stephen Gudeman, Keith Hart, Deborah James, Don Kalb and Jonathan Parry. His intention over many decades has been to contribute to social anthropology, in particular economic anthropology, whilst simultaneously questioning and breaking down disciplinary boundaries across the social sciences and history. The department’s programmes were underpinned by a conception of the unity in diversity of the Eurasian landmass, and of the contributions made by Eurasian civilizations to world history.

Chris Hann is an active Emeritus who continues to do fieldwork in provincial Hungary and to publish on a wide range of subjects (including topical concerns such as populism in Hungary, repression in Xinjiang and warfare in Ukraine).