LUMEN Voices: KNOW Center
In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we’ll shine a spotlight on two of our partners—offering a glimpse into who they are, what they do, and what drives their work within LUMEN. In this edition, Thomas Klebel answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
Know Center Research GmbH is a leading European innovation and research center for trusted AI and Data Science, located in Graz, Austria. Within LUMEN, Know Center leads WP7, aiming to ensure that the solutions developed by LUMEN are sustainable and have a lasting impact on how researchers discover relevant knowledge. In addition, Know Center also contributes to LUMEN’s recommendation algorithm and the development of a chatbot to support discovery and exploration of content.
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
Discovering existing knowledge is central to research. The way our tools for discovery structure what researchers can or cannot find heavily contributes to which questions they ask, and which answers they find. Our contributions to recommendations, the chatbot, and the sustainability of the solutions as a whole thus are exciting opportunities to shape research and have a lasting impact on the community. Specifically, our work on recommenders and AI furthers Know Centers vision for developing trustworthy and explainable AI.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is
Existing evidence shows that more diverse teams lead to more robust science, and crucially, research that is more relevant to broader publics. In addition, research is often most fruitful when recombining knowledge and approaches from different disciplines to solve problems in innovative ways. LUMEN will support researchers in discovering content which is relevant for their research tasks from across disciplines, ultimately strengthening their research.
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Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
Our vision is to support the creation of a set of tools and guidelines that will find support among researchers and relevant stakeholders, such as research infrastructures, communities, and institutions. We aim to build LUMEN and its ecosystem in a way that makes it easy to use and extend it, as well as securing ways of ensuring long-term sustainability.