Vienna Research Festival 2025: The Citizen Science Award was there!

Last weekend, the Vienna Research Festival invited interested parties to get to know research institutions and projects at hands-on stations, lectures and workshops and to try out how research works. The OeAD presented two current projects at the ‘Join in with Citizen Science Projects’ stand, in which active participation in research will be possible from 1 April as part of the Citizen Science Award research competition: In CityLayers, a TU Wien project, citizen scientists are invited to use an app to evaluate urban spaces and mobility and thus contribute to better urban development. The DialektDetect project, led by the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, combines AI with dialect research: it compares how spoken Austrian dialects are recognised by humans and how the process of recognition differs from that of a machine-trained model.

At the Vienna Research Festival, visitors were able to familiarise themselves with the CityLayers app and try it out for themselves. They were also able to listen to audio examples of Austrian dialects, mark on a map of Austria which place or region they assigned this dialect to and compare how the AI categorised these dialects.

The scientists enjoyed many exciting discussions with the research-enthusiastic visitors and cordially invite all interested parties to get involved in science and research as part of the Citizen Science Awards 2025!