BIFOLD researcher honored for pioneering work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the digital humanities
The Jury of the Heinz Billing Prize recognizes Dr. Eberle for his outstanding contributions to the interdisciplinary research project “The Sphere. Knowledge System Evolution and the Shared Scientific Identity of Europe” led by Prof. Dr. Matteo Valleriani at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).
Historical data pose formidable challenges to machine learning, as their high heterogeneity, temporality, and low-resource nature can inspire the development of new learning-based methodologies. Driven by historians’ demand for interpretative accountability and trust, Eberle developed Explainable AI approaches that have made large-scale, machine-derived historical insights possible. His research focuses on transparency, interpretability, and methodological innovation, aiming to make artificial intelligence both applicable to low-resource materials and trustworthy for humanities research.
His achievements include developing deep similarity models for predicting relationships between complex historical data, machine learning approaches for unlabeled historical corpora, and new methods in explainable AI that ensure source traceability and interpretative accountability. Through these contributions, Oliver Eberle shapes how digital methods and machine learning advance historical and cultural research.
“I am truly honored to receive the Heinz Billing Prize and I am even more delighted that this recognition marks the first time the Heinz Billing Prize has honored work at the intersection of the traditional humanities and artificial intelligence. It highlights how learning-based computational methods are reshaping not only the natural sciences but also opening new possibilities for humanities research. I am excited to see how this field will continue to evolve and look forward to the ongoing interdisciplinary exchange between humanities scholars and AI researchers” says Oliver Eberle. “I am deeply grateful to Prof. Dr. Dagmar Schäfer (MPIWG) and Prof. Dr. Matteo Valleriani (MPIWG) for their support, and to Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller (BIFOLD) and Prof. Dr. Grégoire Montavon (Charité/BIFOLD) for their guidance.”
Dr. Eberle’s research bridges machine learning, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and their applications in fundamental research and scientific applications. His work explores how AI systems can generate structured, transparent, and human-interpretable explanations—especially for complex model architectures such as graph neural networks, language models and artificial reasoning models.
After completing a Joint M.Sc. in Computational Neuroscience at TU/HU Berlin in 2017, Eberle earned his Ph.D. Computer Science from TU Berlin in 2022. At BIFOLD, he contributes to research at the intersection of AI theory, scientific modeling, and knowledge discovery in human-centered domains.
The 2025 Heinz Billing Prize award ceremony takes place during the fall meeting of the Human Sciences Section of the Max-Planck-Society, held on October 23–24, 2025 in Berlin. Established in 1993, the award commemorates Prof. Heinz Billing (1914–2017), a pioneer of electronic data processing and one of the key figures behind the early development of scientific computing in Germany.