The Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) in Hamburg will receive additional funding of 10.3 million euros for the funding period 2026 to 2029. In addition, the institute’s basic budget will be permanently increased by 3.3 million euros from 2030. This was decided by the Joint Science Conference (GWK) in Cologne on November 22. With these funds, the institute will expand its research in the areas of automation and artificial intelligence and contribute to the understanding of socio-technical systems from a computer science perspective. This includes topics such as social media platforms, bots, search engines and recommendation systems, as well as the underlying technologies and architectures.
The basis for the funding was a positive evaluation by the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), Germany’s most important scientific advisory body. The evaluation was based on scientific quality, national significance and structural relevance. In all three categories, the HBI was rated as very good or excellent.
Katharina Fegebank, Senator for Science of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg: “I am very pleased that we at the GWK have further strengthened the success of the Hans-Bredow-Institut today. The HBI makes a decisive contribution to Hamburg as a media location and to media research in Germany as a whole. Instagram, TikTok, Chat GPT or Google Translate – the HBI is dedicated to topics that we as politicians and as a society urgently need to understand better. I congratulate Prof. Dr. Schulz and everyone at the HBI on this great achievement and look forward to the insights that will come from it.”
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz, Director of the HBI: “We are very pleased that the federal and state governments are giving us the opportunity to broaden our perspective. In order to understand the significance of communication for democracy, our knowledge base and social cohesion, the technical architectures of platforms or AI applications must also be examined, and this must also be done with new formats of knowledge generation. We can and will do this now and make the knowledge gained available to society.
The strategic expansion of the HBI aims to go beyond research on mass media, intermediaries and platforms to consider the entire socio-technical ecosystem that shapes communication in the digital society. This includes, for example, new types of actors and practices, such as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) or decisions based on optimization criteria from computer science. The HBI intends to complement its interdisciplinary profile with a structural perspective of computer science with a focus on socio-technical ecosystems and to combine it with a governance perspective.
The Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI)
The Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) is a Hamburg-based research institution that has been conducting interdisciplinary research on electronic media and their effects on public communication processes since 1950. As an institute of national importance and structural relevance for the scientific system, the HBI became a member of the renowned Leibniz Association, a consortium of excellent non-university research institutes in Germany, in 2019.
The Joint Science Conference (GWK)
“Strengthening Science Together” – under this motto, the science ministers and the finance ministers of the 16 federal states and the federal government work together in the GWK and jointly decide on a wide range of programs to promote science and research in Germany. German universities and research institutions currently benefit from more than €17 billion per year in funding programmes and projects decided by the GWK. This secures Germany’s position as a strong location for science and innovation.
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