In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we 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, Jan Wiebelitz answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
The Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) is one of Germany’s leading universities of technology and is a member of the TU9 alliance, which comprises the country’s top technical universities. Closely affiliated with Leibniz University Hannover is the L3S Research Center, which plays a central role in the university’s research and innovation ecosystem, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence and digital transformation. L3S focuses on developing intelligent, reliable, and responsible AI systems that address real-world challenges in fields like medicine, mobility, production, and education. Its research encompasses areas including machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and scene and video analysis.
L3S/LUH is contributing to the work packages WP2, WP3, WP5 and WP7 of LUMEN, bringing its expertise of ontology development, knowledge graphs and the development of AI systems to the project.
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
The Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH) is thrilled to contribute to the LUMEN project, which provides the opportunity to be part of a groundbreaking transformation of research infrastructure, enabling truly multidisciplinary discovery, AI-enhanced tools, and open science practices that scale across the European research landscape in the context of the European Open Science Cloud. This aligns closely with the core mission and values of the Leibniz Universität Hannover, which prioritizes interdisciplinary excellence, international collaboration, open inquiry, and meaningful societal impact in both research and teaching.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is conducted?
Through its outcomes LUMEN has the potential to change how research is conducted. The project creates shared discovery and exploration environments where methods, data, and publications from different disciplines are not just co-located, but can be meaningfully connected. In that sense, LUMEN is not just building an infrastructure, it provides means that reshape how researchers discover, connect, and collaborate and thus turn interdisciplinarity into an everyday part of research.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
My main hope is that the outcomes of the LUMEN project are sustained and will help to facilitate cross-disciplinary discovery. Researchers should no longer have to think about which database or community provides which knowledge, but easily explore research questions across domains. Furthermore I hope that the outcome of the LUMEN project strengthens the long tail of research—smaller fields, emerging topics, and interdisciplinary niches as well as citizen science by lowering technical and conceptual barriers. The project’s outcome can help to ensure that high-quality research is visible and reusable regardless of discipline, geography, or institutional size.