Unite! – Springboard for Top International Funding in Teaching and Research

A “Unite! seed fund” project at TU Graz has made the leap into top European funding. Gernot Kubin, head of the Institute of Signal Processing and Speech Communication, is receiving funding from the Erasmus Mundus Design Measure programme for his project to establish a European “Graduate school for speech, language and ai technologies”. This EU funding line supports the partnership-based design of challenging and integrated European study programmes at master’s level by several universities.

The aim of Kubin’s project is to introduce a joint master’s degree programme in the field of language and AI technologies that prepares students for the rapid developments and competitive demands of international research into language technology. The project is not only characterised by its thematic breadth, but also by the cooperation in terms of content and the strong network of renowned experts from all nine Unite! universities. “The fact that our project was selected for funding straight away is a huge success – especially thanks to the original Unite! seed fund project, in which all nine Unite! partners were involved,” says a delighted Gernot Kubin. The specific study programme for the future Erasmus Mundus Joint Master is currently being developed. 

TU Graz partner in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master CYBERSURE

Under the specialist direction of Maria Eichlseder from the Institute of Information Security, TU Graz is a partner of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master CYBERSURE, a master’s programme in the field of cybersecurity. Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters are prestigious international master’s programmes that are jointly designed and offered by at least three higher education institutions from at least three different countries and also involve associated partners from the academic and non-academic sectors. In this specific case, these are NTNU Trondheim, the Unite! partner universities KTH Stockholm and Aalto University, the Technical University of Denmark, the University of Tartu and the French Grande École EURECOM. The first students will start at NTNU Trondheim in the 2026/27 academic year.

Top European funding for sustainable Research

With his “Unite! seed fund” research project “Fostering innovation ecosystems for green mobility transitions”, Thomas Draschbacher, postdoc at the Institute of General Management and Organisation, is conducting research into systemic approaches on how decision-makers in the private and public sector can achieve the EU’s climate neutrality targets in the mobility sector. As part of the “Driving urban transitions partnership call 2024”, the joint project with Unite! partners KTH Stockholm and Aalto University received funding of almost 1.5 million euros.