We are thrilled to announce the keynote speakers for PyCon DE & PyData 2026 in Darmstadt! This year's keynotes bring together world-class expertise in large language models, machine learning education, and multimodal AI research.
Sebastian Raschka is a Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI specializing in large language models and AI systems, and a former Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of bestselling books on machine learning including Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) and Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn, which have become foundational texts in the Python data science community. His research focuses on practical, code-driven implementations of deep learning and LLM development, with over a decade of expertise spanning industry and academia.
Hilde Kühne is a Core Faculty Member at the Tübingen AI Center and a leading computer vision researcher specializing in multimodal learning, action recognition, and video understanding. She received the ICCV 2021 Helmholtz Prize and the TC-PAMI Mark Everingham Prize for her influential work on action classification datasets, and was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her "GraViLa" project on multimodal structure learning. Her research bridges classical computer vision methods with modern deep learning approaches to understand human actions and visual content from real-world data with limited annotations.
With over 25 years of experience in IT and 20 years dedicated to information security, Gabriela possesses a profound understanding of the technical, operational, and strategic layers of cybersecurity. Her expertise is grounded in high-stakes environments, having successfully implemented ISMS and ISO 27001 certifications for major players like Stadler and UMI Urban Mobility International, where she contributed to the launch of the first 100% electric car-sharing service. Beyond her technical prowess, Gabriela is a driven innovator and entrepreneur who famously founded Bogk-Bier Privatbrauerei, a craft brewery credited with saving the Berliner Weisse from extinction. Today, her mission is to harmonize security and resilience with digital transformation, ensuring that an organization's products and services remain secure while actively enabling growth and innovation.
Aaron A. Glenn has spent decades designing the physical and logical infrastructure that makes "The Cloud" possible — from programmable packet forwarding to large-scale network architecture. In his keynote, he takes us above the abstraction layer to ask what digital sovereignty actually means when you understand what the cloud is made of: whose hardware, whose power, whose fiber, whose decisions.