Guessing they use some pretty specific / esoteric software for the experiments that is really hard/impossible to replace, so the Atari soldiers on! 👍
Not sure where the researchers were from, but Ataris were quite common in universities in Germany and eastern Europe more generally in the 80s and 90s, so might well be a legacy of that. I remember seeing quite a few TTs and Mega ST/STes kicking around Uni Hamburg in the mid-90s. I really hope the software they're using is preserved somewhere accessible - it'd be great to see more of how Ataris were (and still are!!!) used in research and academia 🙂