Zwei kleine Roboter stoßen mit Sektgläsern an. Im Hintergrund Feuerwerk und der Schriftzug Happy New Year

Goodbye 2025 – Our Annual Recap 

The year 2025 marks the end of a suc­cess­ful, intense, and very act­ive year for the RHET AI Cen­ter. Before we turn our atten­tion to the new ideas, encoun­ters, and chal­lenges that await us in 2026, we would like to take a look back at some of the high­lights of the past year.

How­ever, instead of recap­ping everything in detail month by month, we want to keep this review of 2025 very personal—told by those who helped shape this year. Before we focus on the indi­vidu­al high­lights of our team mem­bers, how­ever, it is worth tak­ing a brief look at a few mile­stones that had a par­tic­u­lar impact on us in 2025. 

A key moment was the present­a­tion of the policy paper con­tain­ing the recom­mend­a­tions of the Cit­izens' Coun­cil on AI and Free­dom to the Baden-Württem­berg Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Research, and the Arts, Petra Olschow­ski, and state politi­cians. After an intens­ive par­ti­cip­a­tion pro­cess, the jointly developed ideas for cit­izen-ori­ented, respons­ible AI research were offi­cially presented—an import­ant step toward bring­ing social per­spect­ives more strongly into polit­ic­al decision-mak­ing pro­cesses. More inform­a­tion is avail­able here:

👉 https://rhet.ai/2025/03/10/buergerrat-uebergibt-empfehlungen-fuer-buergernahe-ki-forschung/ 

Anoth­er high­light was the launch of our AI escape game for school stu­dents. With "AI – we have a prob­lem!", we have cre­ated a play­ful, low-threshold learn­ing format that pro­motes AI com­pet­ence and at the same time encour­ages stu­dents toen­gage crit­ic­ally with tech­no­logy. The escape game was not only very well received in schools, but also demon­strated how effect­ive innov­at­ive edu­ca­tion­al formats can be:

👉 https://rhet.ai/2025/04/08/ki-wir-haben-ein-problem-ein-escape-game-zur-foerderung-von-ki-kompetenz-im-unterricht/ 

The end of the year was marked by one of the biggest events in the his­tory of RHET AI: the trans­form­at­iv Con­fer­ence in Decem­ber, which we were able to organ­ize togeth­er with exper­i­menta in Heil­bronn. For two days, everything revolvedaround trans­form­a­tion, sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion, and the ques­tion of how research can have a social impact—an intens­ive exchange that provided many new ideas:

👉 https://www.experimenta.science/transformativ/  

In addi­tion to these major mile­stones, 2025 was rich in oth­er spe­cial moments: for example, there was an inspir­ing work­shop with Mike Schäfer in Tübin­gen, which opened up new per­spect­ives on sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion. We also launched ours­er­ies of work­shops for Volk­shoch­schu­len, with the aim of teach­ing AI skills for work and every­day life. In Octo­ber, the new journ­al­ist in res­id­ence, Chris­toph Koch, began his stay in Tübin­gen, com­bin­ing journ­al­ist­ic approaches with every­day research on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Also, the RHET AI was part of a pan­el at the Sci­ence Com­mu­nic­a­tion For­um 2025.

At the same time, our estab­lished formats such as I'm a Sci­ent­ist and Juni­or Sci­ence Café AI, which have been run­ning since 2022 in cooper­a­tion between Wis­senschaft im Dia­log and the RHET AI Cen­ter, as well as Arti­fi­cial Fri­day, our online col­loqui­um on lin­guist­ic per­spect­ives on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, con­tin­ued suc­cess­fully. Our col­leagues gave numer­ous lec­tures and work­shops, pub­lished art­icles (→ list of pub­lic­a­tions), par­ti­cip­ated in pan­el dis­cus­sions, estab­lished new networks–and pur­sued their indi­vidu­al research pro­jects with great ded­ic­a­tion. Many of these were fea­tured in our video series "Ein Blick in" (A Look Into…) this year, which provides insights into all five units and the research fields of the respect­ive team members.

With so many high­lights, big and small, it is of course dif­fi­cult to choose just one spe­cial moment from this year. Nev­er­the­less, we asked our team mem­bers to do just that and send us a pic­ture of their per­son­al RHET AI high­light of the year, along with a short explan­a­tion of what made that moment so special:

Das Bild zeigt eine blau-lila leuchtende, metallene Brotdose vor schwarzem Hintergrund. Auf der Brotdose ist "Für die BlackBox" geschrieben.

Anna Köhler

Das Bild zeigt eine Wäscheleine voller Zettel, die in einem Garten gespannt ist. Im Vordergrund sind Menschen zu sehen, die die Wäscheleine betrachten.

Rafaela Pfeil

Das Bild zeigt fünf Menschen, die an einem großen Tisch sitzen und Materialien für das KI- Escape Game einpacken.

Michael Pelzer

Das Bild zeigt eine Wäscheleine voller Zettel, die in einem Garten gespannt ist. Vor der Wäscheleine kniet ein Mann.

Markus Gott­schling

Das Bild zeigt vier Frauen nebeneinanderstehend und in die Kamera lächelnd

Leya Safiy­an

Das Bild zeigt eine futuristische Szene eines Filmsets. Zu sehen ist eine Gasse in einer modernen Großstadt bei Nacht mit Leuchtreklame. Mittig im Bild zu sehen ist ein humanoider Roboter.

Anne Burkhardt

Das Bild zeigt eine Wäscheleine voller Zettel, die in einem Garten gespannt ist. Im Vordergrund sind Menschen zu sehen, die die Wäscheleine betrachten.

Pat­riz­ia Attar

You can read about the stor­ies, which moments these pic­tures sym­bol­ize and what made them so spe­cial to the RHET AI mem­bers, here:

Anna Köhler (Unit 1)
Das Bild zeigt eine blau-lila leuchtende, metallene Brotdose vor schwarzem Hintergrund. Auf der Brotdose ist "Für die BlackBox" geschrieben.
"The photo shows a black lunch box that Pat­riz­ia put togeth­er for Monika and me on the occa­sion of sub­mit­ting our joint Black Box art­icle, which we wrote togeth­er with Fran­ziska Bur­esch. For me, the pic­ture sym­bol­izes both the excite­ment and joy of finally sub­mit­ting the art­icle after months of work, but also the great team spir­it at RHET AI (and espe­cially, of course, Unit 1 🙂 )."
Rafaela Pfeil (Unit 3)
Das Bild zeigt eine Wäscheleine voller Zettel, die in einem Garten gespannt ist. Im Vordergrund sind Menschen zu sehen, die die Wäscheleine betrachten.
"I think it's great how we col­lect­ively looked back at the past using the timeline at the RHET AI Day. In my day-to-day work, I often hear about the excit­ing pro­jects and events hap­pen­ing in oth­er units, but see­ing the sheer volume of notes gives me a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive on how much is actu­ally hap­pen­ing at the cen­ter."
Bild: Anna Köhler
Michael Pelzer (Unit 2)
Das Bild zeigt fünf Menschen, die an einem großen Tisch sitzen und Materialien für das KI- Escape Game einpacken.
"Team­work makes the dream work" – which was also true for the cre­ation of our escape game "AI! We have a prob­lem!" (Spring 2025)
Markus Gott­schling (Wis­senschaft­lich­er Koordin­at­or, Unit 3)
Das Bild zeigt eine Wäscheleine voller Zettel, die in einem Garten gespannt ist. Vor der Wäscheleine kniet ein Mann.
"This pic­ture from the RHET AI Day in the sum­mer is a spe­cial high­light for me because we hung up a sum­mary of all our work on these lines—and it became clear just how much we have achieved togeth­er at RHET AI."

Photo: Salina Weber
Tamara Teuber, Leya Safiy­an, Ker­stin Grundhöf­fer (Wis­senschaft im Dialog)
Das Bild zeigt vier Frauen nebeneinanderstehend und in die Kamera lächelnd
"The photo is a spe­cial moment for us, as we had the oppor­tun­ity to give a present­a­tion at trans­form­at­iv with our team and our two speak­ers, Dr. Vera Dop­piu and Clarissa Hoh­en­walde, to provide insight into our two sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion pro­jects (I'm a Sci­ent­ist and the Juni­or Sci­ence Café AI) with stu­dents. We were able to exchange ideas with oth­er sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion act­ors who also work with school stu­dents and gained an incred­ible amount of inspir­a­tion for our own work. 
The present­a­tions, per­form­ances, and workshops—but also the con­ver­sa­tions out­side the offi­cial con­fer­ence program—gave us many new ideas to think about. We also had a really nice time with the rest of the RHET AI team. Since we are based in Ber­lin and rarely vis­it Tübin­gen, events like this are always very spe­cial for us.
The photo was taken shortly after our present­a­tion, and I think you can still see how excited we all were about the conference!"
Anne Burkhardt (Unit 2)
Das Bild zeigt eine futuristische Szene eines Filmsets. Zu sehen ist eine Gasse in einer modernen Großstadt bei Nacht mit Leuchtreklame. Mittig im Bild zu sehen ist ein humanoider Roboter.
"This is a set photo from the film 'El Corazón de la Luna' (Aldo Salvini, 2021, Peru). The film was one of ten fea­tured in my study on AI in Lat­in Amer­ic­an cinema.

For me per­son­ally, this year was all about writ­ing and pub­lish­ing, includ­ing in the con­text of this study. I was par­tic­u­larly pleased that the art­icle deal­ing with the inter­views I con­duc­ted with Lat­in Amer­ic­an film­makers (dir­ect­ors and/or screen­writers of the 10 selec­ted films) was pub­lished in AI&Society. This was the first time I had dared to approach such a 'high-rank­ing' journ­al, and it was all the more sat­is­fy­ing that it worked out:
 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025–02577‑3  🙂"
Pat­riz­ia Attar (Unit 1)
Das Bild zeigt eine Wäscheleine voller Zettel, die in einem Garten gespannt ist. Im Vordergrund sind Menschen zu sehen, die die Wäscheleine betrachten.
"It was great fun to recap the RHET AI past and search for free slots on the timeline. The beau­ti­ful view, the weath­er, and the pizza provided the per­fect setting."


With this beau­ti­ful and per­son­al review, we take our leave of 2025 and look for­ward to all the new things that await us in 2026. We wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for the com­ing 12 months!

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