Prof. Steffen Eckhard receives 2 million euro ERC Consolidator Grant

Friedrichshafen. In the foreseeable future, so-called AI agents will be used in many municipal and state authorities to advise people. This means that in future, citizens will communicate more and more frequently with artificial intelligence when they have questions for institutions, and less and less frequently with real people.

Prof. Steffen Eckhard, holder of the Chair of Public Administration & Public Policy, wants to investigate how these interactions with artificial intelligence will affect how citizens perceive the state and its administrative units. "We want to find out what people think about a state that is represented by artificial intelligence," explains Prof. Eckhard, "and what the use of AI agents does to trust in this state, for example?"

For the research project entitled "Biases in Administrative Service Encounters: Transitioning from Human to Artificial Intelligence (BiASE-AI)", Prof. Steffen Eckhard has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council*. This involves funding of two million euros over five years.

"I congratulate Prof. Steffen Eckhard on this great success," says ZU President Prof. Klaus Mühlhahn. "With this project, his chair at Zeppelin University is one of the absolute top research units in Europe." According to the Research Council, 328 of 2313 funding applications were approved, which corresponds to 14.2 percent. "This shows the high, international level of research at Friedrichshafen University," says Mühlhahn.

The project partners also include the city of Friedrichshafen. The project also complements the growing focus on artificial intelligence at Zeppelin University - together with the introduction of a compulsory AI foundation course for all students and the establishment of a new endowed chair for artificial intelligence in 2024.

There is also a second research project at Zeppelin University that is funded by the European Research Council: Prof. Steffen Hurka, holder of the Chair of European Politics, who moved from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich to Zeppelin University this summer, started work on his Chair of European Politics | Zeppelin University, which also received an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council.

The first ERC Consolidator Grant at Zeppelin University was awarded to Prof. Lisbeth Zimmermann in 2022, but she moved to Goethe University in Frankfurt in the same year and continued the research project there.