Knowledge engineering has long provided the foundations for intelligent information systems through the acquisition and formalisation of knowledge. However, as contemporary systems grow in scale, complexity, and autonomy - spanning cyber-physical infrastructures and agentic environments - the field of knowledge engineering is undergoing a fundamental transformation.
Indeed, to meet the demands of these emerging settings, knowledge engineering practices have undergone significant diversification. In particular, they are evolving towards increasingly intricate neuro-symbolic workflows that combine AI methods of both a symbolic and sub-symbolic nature.
In this talk, I will explore this emerging area of neuro-symbolic knowledge engineering: What are representative examples of such approaches? What new challenges arise from the integration of neural and symbolic components? These insights are expected to be of interest to the broad computer science audience of FedCSIS, in particular, researchers and practitioners who focus on developing novel systems in which formally represented knowledge plays a central role.

Prof. Sabou leads the Semantic Systems research group, which performs foundational and applied research on topics ranging from knowledge engineering (knowledge graphs and their evaluation, data integration) to the development of novel intelligent systems that combine both symbolic and sub-symbolic AI techniques, i.e., neuro-symbolic systems. Increasingly, the group addresses topics in the area of Digital Humanism such as the auditing of AI systems and the involvement of human stakeholders in the design of intelligent systems. As an active member of the Austrian AI community, she fulfills several high visibility roles such as being a board member of the Austrian Society for AI, a board member of WU’s competence center of Applied AI and Scientific Computing and a Key Researcher in the BILAI project, which is Austria’s largest basic science AI research project. Furthermore, she currently co-leads a large Doctoral College for Digital Humanism and is an advisory board member of the Association for Digital Humanism.