Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence: ATHENE honors Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych with a Distinguished Professorship
Prof. Iryna Gurevych, a renowned computer scientist from the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt), has received the first ATHENE Distinguished Professorship. This award recognizes her outstanding contributions to research in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, and their application in cybersecurity.
14.07.2025. Professor of computer science Iryna Gurevych from TU Darmstadt has been awarded the first Distinguished Professorship of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE. This special program supports outstanding scientists at participating universities whose research combines scientific excellence with significant impact in applied cybersecurity. Recognition as an ATHENE Distinguished Professor comes with long-term funding for a research project.
Professor Gurevych is one of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. She has been conducting research and teaching in the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt since 2007, where she leads the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Academia Europaea. In 2021, she became the first scientist to be awarded a LOEWE Top Professorship by the state of Hesse. She was the first German university professor to receive the prestigious Milner Award from the Royal Society, which she received in 2025.
Her research contributes significantly to the early detection of manipulative language behavior, disinformation, and social engineering attacks. In the context of cognitive security, which deals with the protection of human perception and decision-making from targeted influence, her work provides the methodological basis for identifying and countering narrative attacks, targeted misdirection, and psychological manipulation in digital spaces. Her research therefore builds an important bridge between technical cybersecurity and the protection of human information processing.
As part of the ATHENE Distinguished Professorship, Prof. Gurevych will address issues such as the explainability and controllability of large language models, secure human-AI collaboration, and the automated detection of multimodal disinformation.
“Secure and trustworthy AI is one of the greatest challenges in modern computer science. Large language models are currently transforming various areas of life – such as education, work and medicine – in a fundamental way. Through our research, we are working to ensure that AI becomes a trustworthy ally and a welcome member of society”'says Prof. Iryna Gurevych.
Further information on the research project can be found on the project website: https://ai-safety.ukp-lab.de/.
