The two Leipzig-based research institutions are pooling their expertise in the digital humanities
With a cooperation agreement signed on Tuesday (30 June 2026), both institutions laid the foundations for a joint professorship in ‘Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing’ at the Faculty of Computer Science and Media at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences (HTWK Leipzig).
For the university, this marks its first institutional collaboration with the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig (SAW).
The aim of this long-term collaboration is to equip students with state-of-the-art digital methods, such as automated language processing and AI-supported information retrieval, for use in long-term research in the humanities. Over the next five years, the new professorship is set to benefit from significant freedom to conduct research and will be directly linked to the Academy’s current projects, which, amongst other things, are utilising and continuously developing digital handwriting and watermark recognition as well as AI-based analysis of large volumes of text.
Both institutions expect the collaboration to drive innovation at the interface between computer science and the humanities (Digital Humanities), as well as to foster closer integration between academic teaching and non-university research.
SAW President Prof. Dr Hans-Joachim Knölker emphasises the benefits for supporting early-career researchers: “The
numerous projects within the Academies’ Programme – which is unique in Europe – are driving major innovations in the field of Digital Humanities. We are delighted to be able to pass on this experience to our students and, ideally, to spark their fascination with long-term research in the digital humanities at the same time.”
For HTWK Rector Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jean-Alexander Müller, the partnership is a milestone for the university:
“Research and development in the field of natural language processing is an indispensable building block of what AI is today. For HTWK Leipzig, the collaboration with the renowned SAW represents a major opportunity: it can showcase its expertise whilst benefiting from SAW’s outstanding research and the concrete application possibilities.”
The professorship will be advertised in the second half of 2026 as a permanent,full-time W2 professorship.
