Although industrial digitalization is a key area of focus (e.g. Industry 4.0, smart factories, and AI), little attention is paid to why there has been no real breakthrough over the past 15 years and why the majority of projects fail to progress beyond the level of superficial solutions.

The aim of the workshop is to introduce participants to the key steps of digitalization processes, with a particular focus on practical mistakes made in applied research.

We will also present examples of industrial R&D from a Hungarian-owned manufacturing company, highlighting the challenges involved as well as an emerging research framework that could support the successful implementation of digitalization projects.

The aim of the framework is to strengthen cooperation between industrial and academic stakeholders by facilitating the development of joint applied research and development projects.

Organiser: Andó Mátyás, ELTE IK 

Workshop will be in Hungarian.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

In the wake of the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary elections, it is particularly timely to take a closer look together at what we can learn from the public opinion polls conducted and published during the campaign.

The workshop will bring together researchers, polling organisations, and professionals who use research findings in the media, public policymaking, and other fields to share their experiences and perspectives.

A panel discussion will provide an opportunity for further professional exchange.

The event is not intended solely for professionals in the field. We also welcome anyone interested in how public opinion research works and keen to better understand what lies behind the results presented in the public sphere.

Together with the participants, we will explore how polling can be made more transparent, more comparable, and more responsibly interpreted.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together different perspectives and identify shared principles and potential professional directions that can contribute to the reliability of public opinion research and to its credible presentation to the public.

Organiser: Blanka Szeitl és az ELTE Survey Methods Room Budapest, ELTE TáTK 

The workshop will be in Hungarian.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

International experiences from pilot teaching and learning programs 

Overall, the workshop aims at fostering international collaboration and to show how a wide range of educational initiatives students can interact with and build lasting partnerships among different sectors and countries. 

The scope of workshop presenters is to show their expertise related to innovative teaching and learning environments, specifically their experiences with pilot learning and teaching programs and how to develop pilot programs in higher education. The workshop will be held in English language. 

The workshop aims at providing a wide scope how to prepare higher education students for real work life situations while obtaining a university degree successfully. We’d also give a perspective on how to upskill the existing body of employees in higher education institution surrounding these students in order to achieve the goal of students success. 

Last but not least, we’d like to provide international research evidence related the topic how soft skills can be benefited lifelong in the workforce beyond the education facilities. 

We invite experts who teach and train higher education students, who develop curricula institution-wide and teach leadership, who carry out international projects aiming at developing teaching staff and who touch the public education system nationwide and prepare for the future. 

Speakers: 

• Dr. Takács Rita, ELTE, Faculty of Informatics, Assistant Professor, Head of Student Support Centre, Counselling Psychologist 

• Lucas Müller, CENTRAL Leadership Program pilot program participant, PhD Student and Research Fellow, Humbold Univesität zu Berlin 

• Turóczi Hajnalka, Pathway to Business Program pilot program participant, PhD Student, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Psychologist 

• One online participant from abroad - name and institution is in progress 

Workshop lead: Viktória Nagy, PhD Candidate, ELTE Faculty of Informatics, Informatics Methodology School, Work and Organisational Psychologist 

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

The workshop will be in English

The workshop will showcase several practical, industrial applications of speech technology while also demonstrating the academic and research background of the field. The speakers have decades of experience and strong academic backgrounds in data science, artificial intelligence research and applications, and language technology.

The project aims to support people with speech impairments through language technology and automatic speech recognition. During the workshop, we will explore the latest developments and challenges in language technology related to this field. The workshop will take place on 30 September 2026 at ELTE’s Lágymányos Campus.

Organiser: Roland Keszi, ELTE BGGYK

For morre information: https://keszi.krolify.hu/hu/kutatas/elte-innofair/ 

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

“AI won’t take your job – but someone who knows how to prompt better than you might!”

Dear entrepreneurs, teachers, public-sector employees, and everyone in between!

Are you tired of ChatGPT talking to you like an overenthusiastic American marketer?

Bored of AI confidently making things up (aka hallucinating) about laws or books that don’t even exist, as if it wrote them itself? Or would you simply like to cut those two hours of daily admin down to just 10 minutes?

Join our fast-paced, 60-minute interactive workshop, AI EDIH: A Taste of Prompting, where we’ll show you how to train your very own “digital intern”!

Organiser: Turcsányi-Szabó Márta, ELTE IK

The workshop will be held in Hungarian.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok

The workshop focuses on how digital technologies can support the development of academic and specialised language skills in higher education.

Building on the findings of the Nyelvhasználat felsőfokon research project, participants will explore a technology-supported model of autonomous language learning, insights from data-driven mapping of the needs of teachers and students, and innovative development solutions based on these findings.

A key focus of the workshop is the use of digital learning materials, adaptive learning pathways, and personalised learning environments, which offer new opportunities for the effective development of specialised language skills.

During the interactive programme, participants will have the opportunity to develop technology-based ideas and solutions that can also be applied in their own institutional contexts. 

Speakers: Albert Ágnes, Csizér Kata, Katona László, Tartsay Németh Nóra, Wind Attila, ELTE BTK 

The workshop will be in Hungarian. 

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) and related intensive longitudinal approaches are transforming the study of human behavior, emotion, and cognition. By repeatedly assessing experiences, activities, and contextual factors in daily life, these methods provide ecologically valid insights that cannot be captured through traditional cross-sectional or laboratory-based research alone. While this approach has revolutionized affective science and mental health research in the past decades, its potential remains to be exploited in the study of other aspects of health and societal dynamics. 

By bringing together researchers from psychology, social sciences, health sciences, data science, and related fields, the workshop will demonstrate how these methods can generate novel scientific insights while addressing real-world societal challenges. The program will combine methodological perspectives, research applications, technology demonstrations, and interactive discussions to foster new collaborations within ELTE and across the broader regional research ecosystem.

The workshop is intended for researchers, doctoral students, data scientists, and innovation partners interested in leveraging real-time behavioral data to advance both scientific discovery and societal impact.

Experience sampling expertise at the Institute of Psychology, ELTE, will be presented by Prof. Gyöngyi Kökönyei, Dr. Natália Kocsel, Dr. Lilla Kovács, Dr. Péter Simor, Miha Likar, Dr. Bertalan Polner, and Dr. Tamás Nagy. 

After a coffee break, Dr. Adam Kurilla (Comenius University Bratislava) will present how experience sampling can advance mental health, and Dr. Merijn Mestdagh (m-Path / KU Leuven) will discuss novel trends and challenges in daily life assessment. The workshop will conclude with a roundtable discussion.

Organiser: Bertalan Polner, ELTE PPK 

Workshop will be in English.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

Typical AI use generally involves asking a generative model to produce the end result directly: generating an image, writing a text summary, or even creating a game through vibe coding.

In this workshop, we move beyond this conventional approach and explore creative ways of using AI, including the advantages of not asking it to produce the final product directly. The two-level problem-solving strategy we examine involves using AI to create an intermediate helper automation or a custom-purpose tool that can combine creative ideas with automated and precise implementation.

We will demonstrate this approach across as wide a range of applications as possible, from office work and infographics to scientific applications. Case studies related to research workflows and data security will have a particular focus. When AI is used to create the tool rather than the final product itself, sensitive company or research data does not necessarily have to be shared with a third party: the resulting tool can, where appropriate, process the data locally and within the organisation.

No prior knowledge is required to participate in the workshop. The programme begins with a general introduction to vibe coding, including many practical tips that complete beginners can also use. This is followed by more specialised examples from different fields, demonstrating how vibe coding can be applied as part of a two-level problem-solving process.

Speaker: Gáspár Merse Előd, ELTE IK

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

Towards a Precision Psychiatry Ecosystem

How could speech, social interaction and other behavioural signals help clinicians recognise changes in mental and cognitive health?

The Towards a Precision Psychiatry Ecosystem workshop explores how artificial intelligence and digital measures could complement clinical expertise in mental health, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative conditions. The discussion will span spontaneous speech and Speech Gap measures, multimodal behaviour analysis, biological and precision psychiatry, avatar-based interaction, clinical validation and responsible healthcare innovation.

The event will also introduce the Precision Psychiatry Ecosystem, a developing collaborative framework for researchers, clinicians, technology developers and innovation partners in Hungary and abroad. Its purpose is to connect complementary expertise, identify feasible joint projects and build the conditions for multilingual, clinically grounded research.

These approaches are intended to quantify information pieces and assist, not replace, clinicians. The workshop will therefore address reliability, interpretability, privacy, data protection, ethics, regulation and the practical demands of evaluation in real healthcare settings.

Organizer and moderator: András Lőrincz, PhD, habil.

Registration: ELTE INNOFAIR 2026 registration

Presenters and presentation topics

Workshop will be in English

Organiser: András Lőrincz, ELTE IK

Registration: https://elte.hu/form/innofair-2026-programok 

For the past three years, our “AI in Higher Education” research group at ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences has been collaborating with the founders of goschool.ai to develop an AI tutor for higher education. 

The tutor is now used by 75 instructors across 15 institutions in 3 countries in 200 courses. It is based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technique and offers educators a range of flexible solutions to help them achieve their pedagogical goals. 

Our research group works from the premise that AI is already entering education, whether or not educators notice. This shift calls for renewing how we teach. 

Our empirical field is the database of student-AI conversations, which functions both as an experimental environment and a research corpus. These interactions reveal learning patterns under natural conditions, which questionnaire-based or laboratory studies rarely provide. We examined the functioning of the AI tutor and any potential hallucinations, analyzed the chat logs using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. We identified different learning strategies in the use of the tutor’s services by comparing courses across various academic disciplines. We examined the tutor’s language use and students’ tendency to anthropomorphize the AI. We worked in an interdisciplinary team involving some of the course instructors, as well as an educational pedagogy expert, an IT expert, a linguist, a philosopher, a sociologist and an anthropologist. 

We are convinced that AI is a transformative technology: not merely a technological advancement, but an innovation that has the potential to fundamentally reshape everyday life, including education. The goal of the workshop, therefore, is to prepare for this. 

Educators are not failing to prepare for the challenges posed by AI because they do not see the problem, but because it presents them with a challenge that requires skills they do not necessarily possess. The emergence of LLMs forces them to decide: whether to accept that the value of certain learning objectives will change, or to try to preserve the old system. Every choice also involves letting go of something, so the choice can lead to a sense of loss. For educators, the introduction of AI may also bring potential gains, but the losses seem much more tangible: the credibility of traditional exams, expert authority and familiar teaching routines. People generally react more strongly to these losses than to potential gains (Kahneman, Tversky, 1979). Therefore, the response to AI in higher education and education should not be expected at the individual level, but rather at the institutional level, through the creation of regulations, institutional frameworks, and new pedagogical practices. 

In line with this, the goal of our workshop is to present our research findings, build connections with relevant experts in the field, and exchange experiences. Our question is: what can instructors do about cognitive outsourcing - that is, the tendency to entrust certain tasks, in whole or in part, to an external tool? We aim to support instructors in deciding what to teach and how to assess students when this outsourcing occurs. We are seeking answers to how AI can be used as a constructive pedagogical method that fosters critical thinking and deeper learning. 

List of invited speakers (name, institution, country, field of expertise)  

• Árpád Tamási, industry partner, founder of Progos Kft and GoSchool.ai, with thirtyfive years of experience in software development, AI transition expert (Stanford AI), currently a doctoral student at the ELTE Interdisciplinary Social Research PhD Program; his doctoral research examines AI-based cognitive outsourcing as a historical and social mechanism through the educational use of artificial intelligence. 

• Blanka Støren-Vaczy, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway, sociologist and social policy expert, currently researching the application of AI in higher education 

• Omid Mirmotahari, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway; works at the intersection of AI, assessment and pedagogy in higher education, and serves as president of UiO's Pedagogic Academy. His innovations in higher education have been recognized with several national awards. 

• Miklós Szabó, Head of Department, sociologist, cultural anthropologist, ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences, founder of GoSchool.ai, head of the AI in Higher Education research group, anthropology of technology 

• Renáta Németh, Institute Director, co-leader of ELTE Research Center for Computational Social Science, applied mathematician, sociologist, ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences, and researcher of the “AI in Higher Education” research group for the past three years 

Planned Program and Implementation Plan (a 2 hour long program) 

• Renáta Németh: Welcome, Introduction (10 min) 

• Miklós Szabó, Renáta Németh: Usage patterns derived from a synthesis of courses in various academic disciplines. (15 min + 10 min discussion) • 

• Blanka Støren-Vaczy: What do students actually do when they use the system? Learning patterns based on the chat logs. (15 min + 10 min discussion) •

• Omid Mirmotahari: When artificial intelligence writes a student’s assignment, is it the student or the assignment that fails? (15 min + 10 min discussion) •

• Árpád Tamási: The power of outsourcing based on chat logs (15 min + 10 min discussion)  

• Open discussion: If AI takes over part of the knowledge transfer process, what will become of the teacher’s role? In this workshop, we’ll explore how education will transform when retrieving knowledge is no longer an obstacle, and how teachers can help channel the attention and energy freed up into genuine learning, discovery, and creativity. How can we design better tasks and courses? (50 min) 

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

The workshop will be in English

This 90-minute interactive workshop uses practical examples, Hungarian experiences, and contributions from several EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) to demonstrate how researchers, students, startups, and university innovation professionals can connect to the EIT’s European network.

Participants will learn about the programmes, collaboration opportunities, and development opportunities offered by the individual KICs, as well as the practical value that connecting to or becoming involved with a KIC can bring.

The interactive session will help participants identify, through concrete examples, which entry point into the EIT network may be most relevant to a particular research, innovation, or business goal.

At the end of the workshop, participants will also gain access to current EIT opportunities, calls for proposals, and further opportunities for engagement.

Moderator: Soltész Krisztina, EIT Community Officer (Hungary) 

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

The workshop will be in Hungarian

Discover how Virtual Reality is transforming neurodiagnostics, neurorehabilitation, and workplace mental health. 

This interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together researchers, clinicians, healthcare professionals, technology developers, industry experts, and digital health innovators to explore the potential of VR in real-world healthcare. 

Learn about the latest evidence and innovations. Experience VR solutions through hands-on demonstrations. Co-Design future applications and practical solutions. 

Share ideas and perspectives. Network with researchers, clinicians, and industry. Together, we will explore how VR can enable personalized rehabilitation, measurable outcomes, mental wellbeing, and innovative approaches to healthcare. Come experience the future of VR in healthcare — and help shape what comes next. 

Speakers

Prof. Nicola De Pisapia, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Italy

Dr. Iveta Fajnerová
Neuropsychologist and Researcher; Head of Research Center
National Institute of Mental Health, Prague, Czech Republic

Dr. Emil Rosenlund Høeg
Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology
Aalborg University, Denmark

Prof. Cecilia Sík-Lányi
Professor, Department of Information Technology
University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary

Dr. Patricia Szabó, Senior Lecturer
Department of Information Technology
University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary

Bálint Vörös, Student
University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary

Ádám Salamon, Student
University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary

Dr. Pál Kaszai
Euronet Magyarország Informatika Zrt., Hungary

Miklós Tatár
Euronet Magyarország Informatika Zrt., Hungary

Zoltán Hajdú
Euronet Magyarország Informatika Zrt., Hungary

Soma Zsebi, PhD Student
Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology (PPK), Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)
EMIND Research Lab & Euronet Magyarország Informatika Zrt., Hungary

Dr. Renata Cserjési, Associate Professor
Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Psychology (PPK), Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)
EMIND Research Lab, Hungary

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

The workshop will be in English

DZNE, the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases is a premier, interdisciplinary research institute focusing on translating fundamental biomedical research into practical products, diagnostics, and therapies for diseases neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In this talk, you will learn different approaches that are taken at the DZNE to foster innovation and make scientific translation to society possible. 

Speaker: Nadia Villacampa, DZNE 

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

The workshop will be in English

The Impact of Dual Education on Developing Corporate Innovation Capabilities

The aim of the workshop is to demonstrate how dual mechanical engineering education can contribute to corporate innovation and how students can become active participants in corporate development projects. The programme will explore how academic knowledge, industry experience, and student creativity can be brought together to support innovation.

Organiser: Bak Árpád, ELTE IK 

The workshop will be in Hungarian.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

How does a research finding become real-world value? What role do collaborations between companies, universities, and research institutions play in this process? How does an innovation ecosystem work in practice, and what makes research useful from a social or economic perspective?

These are some of the questions we will explore at the next innovation workshop organised by the Faculty of Sciences at ELTE.

📅 1 October 2026, from 1:00 PM
📍 ELTE TTK, North Building – Richter Room

Throughout the afternoon, we will explore how open innovation and innovation ecosystems work from different perspectives.

Topics will include:

• the innovation ecosystem of Gedeon Richter Plc., and how collaboration between a company, universities, and research institutions can create value;

• the relationship between applied research and research impact, illustrated through the example of the Bay Zoltán Research Centre;

• practical experiences of university–industry collaboration through the ELTE–Ericsson Software Technology Lab and EIT innovation projects.

The panel discussion will explore how university–industry collaboration can become a genuine win-win-win model—creating value for companies, universities, and the next generation of researchers and developers alike.

We welcome researchers, lecturers, PhD students, and colleagues interested in innovation who would like to better understand how successful connections can be built between research, industry, and the wider innovation ecosystem.

Organiser: Kacskovics Judit, ELTE TTK KKIC

The workshop will be in Hungarian.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok 

Exhibition stands featuring companies and research groups, offering an opportunity to discover the latest developments and explore potential collaboration opportunities firsthand.

Registration: https://elte.hu/en/webform/innofair_2026_programok