News
Iryna Gurevych elected to the Academia Europaea
ATHENE Principal Investigator Prof Iryna Gurevych has been elected to the Academia Europaea. This honours her many years of academic excellence and international visibility in the fields of Artificial Intelligence AI and Natural Language Processing. At ATHENE, Iryna Gurevych conducts research in the field of security and privacy in AI and the technical discovery of manipulated media content.
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ATHENE research on perception manipulation in augmented reality honored at CHI 2025
ATHENE researchers presented their innovative research on “SwitchAR” at the renowned CHI Conference 2025 in Yokohama and received the Jury Honorable Mention Award. The technology, developed as part of the ATHENE project “XR-Guard - A Security Mechanism to Detect and Mitigate Perceptual Manipulations in Extended Reality” under the coordination of Prof. Jan Gugenheimer, enables the application of perceptual manipulations in augmented reality (AR) environments for the first time.
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Successful submission to the S&P
A paper co-authored by ATHENE scientists Dr. Nina Gerber and Dr. Alina Stoever, along with researchers from ETH Zurich, has been accepted for presentation at the prestigious IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P). S&P is the foremost forum in which leading international experts from academia and industry can discuss the latest developments in computer security and electronic data protection.
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Award for ATHENE researcher: Most Influential Paper at ICSE
The paper "IccTA: Detecting Inter-Component Privacy Leaks in Android Apps", which was written ten years ago with significant input from ATHENE researcher Dr Steven Arzt, has been awarded the Most Influential Paper ICSE N-10 prize at this year's International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
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Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for ATHENE researcher
Prof. Mira Mezini, representative of TU Darmstadt on the ATHENE Board, has been awarded the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize 2025 for her pioneering contributions to software engineering. The Dahl-Nygaard Prize has been awarded by the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO) since 2004 and is one of the most important awards in the field of object-oriented software engineering. The award ceremony will take place during the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP), European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP), which will take place from 30 June to 4 July 2025.
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Study shows: AI systems generate manipulative design patterns without explicit instruction
In their latest study, ATHENE researchers, together with researchers from the University of Glasgow and Humboldt University in Berlin, show that AI applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude AI automatically integrate manipulative design patterns (dark patterns) into website code. These manipulative elements are implemented even for neutral queries, without the AI systems pointing out the legal or ethical implications.
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