Wilhelm Exner Medal 2025

… Sepp Hochreiter!

The jury and the board have unanimously awarded Mr Hochreiter the prestigious medal for 2025.

Prof Hochreiter the most internationally renowned European AI researcher and professor at Johannes Kepler University Linz. He is one of around ten scientists worldwide who have made fundamental contributions to AI. His invention of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is the most cited research result by an Austrian computer scientist, with over 100,000 citations. It is remarkable that he made this invention while still working on his thesis at the University of Salzburg.

Although his work was not initially recognised, his invention has given Austrian science the opportunity to become an international leader in one of the most cutting-edge areas of computer science. Hochreiter is now the figurehead for turning this fundamental invention into an economic success for the Austrian and European software industry. With the founding of the company NXAI, he has succeeded in motivating major players in the industry to provide the substantial financial resources, lobbying and marketing channels needed for the commercial exploitation of the method.

His research focuses on machine learning methods, in particular deep learning, long short-term memory, representational learning, biclustering and matrix factorisation, as well as statistical methods. The areas of application for his research range from the analysis of biological data and pharmacy to autonomous systems, computer vision and e-commerce. Hochreiter has an h-index of 65, and his papers have been cited nearly 180,000 times, over 130,000 times since 2020 alone.

Congratulations!

The Exner Lectures and the Award Ceremony will be held on November 19th and 20th, 2025 at Palais Eschenbach Wien, the foundation’s seat.