Summer Network Meeting 2023

For the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub's 2023 Network Meeting we went to Seestadt Aspern, Vienna's largest urban expansion area. By 2030, flats for around 25,000 people and 20,000 jobs will have been built here.

We started off at the aspern Development AG showroom, where Marvin Mitterwallner (Infocenter of the aspern Development AG) welcomed us with an interesting talk on the area and the parameters that went into the development of this new part of the city. We then walked through the green (formerly concrete) streets of Seestadt, where Elisabeth Oberzaucher introduced us to the project "Urban Intervention with Art in Public Space" (PI Helmut Leder, Co-PI Elisabeth Oberzaucher).

We escaped from the rain to a guided tour of the Pilotfabrik: A TU Wien Facility that will play an important role in "A2I - Assist to Include", a collaborative project between the TU Wien (Sebastian Schlund, David Kostolani), the University of Vienna (Jozsef Arato), and Wien Work (Karolina Gasparovski), an organization that supports people disadvantaged in the labor market to find jobs or apprenticeships. The project will focus on the development of assistive technologies (focus on augmented reality) in complex work processes for people with learning, sensory, or cognitive impairments.

After a thorough demonstration of one of the Pilotfabrik's assistive assembly modules, we settled in at the Speiseamt Seestadt (part of Wien Work), where Julia Egger introduced the latest project started at the Vienna CogSciHub: "RESONATE: Resiliance through Nature-based Therapies", a Horizon Europe Project led by Mathew White. The thematic and methodological range of the presented projects once again underlines the interdisciplinary span of the research bundled at the Vienna CogSciHub.

After some closing remarks from Speaker Helmut Leder, we spent the rest of the afternoon eating, drinking, and networking, expertly taken care of by the crew and trainees of Speiseamt Seestadt.