The Chair of Data Science at the CAIDAS Center of the University of Würzburg, led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho, organized the “Connect@Speinshart” retreat, bringing together 14 researchers. The chair is structured around three core research areas: Machine Learning for Climate Change (Climate), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and AI for Cybersecurity (Security).
Recent work within these groups highlights significant advances in their respective domains. Examples include progress in domain-specific language models (Pfister et al., 2025), the application of AI in climate modeling (Gallusser et al., 2025), and AI-driven approaches to fraud detection (Tritscher et al., 2024).
The retreat pursued a twofold objective. First, it aimed to strengthen the focus within each research group by facilitating in-depth discussions on current progress and challenges in their specific fields. Second, it sought to establish a structured, cross-group dialogue. This interdisciplinary exchange was designed to identify shared methodological foundations, such as model architectures or explainability approaches, that underpin the diverse application areas.
Overall, the retreat provided a valuable platform for both deepening domain-specific research and fostering collaboration across thematic boundaries.
In late April, the Data Science Chair at CAIDAS, University of Würzburg, headed to Kloster Speinshart for four days. As the chair has three groups (climate, language, and cybersecurity), the retreat was a great chance to get everyone in one place for a week of focused work as a whole group. A lot of that happened in the afternoons. Talks in the morning, then small groups, paper sketches, and conversations that ran past dinner more than once. It kept turning out that a method one group was wrestling with was the same thing another group was wrestling with for a different application. In all of this, Speinshart was the perfect location. The abbey is beautiful and properly quiet, and the long evenings and great catering left us actual time to think. Big thanks to the SSC for hosting us!
Simon Hentschel
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