Department of Informatics – DDIS

Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems Group

Reflecting on 2023

12. February 2024 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on Reflecting on 2023

Already more than one month into 2024, there is still time to reflect back on a year filled with numerous accomplishments, both on personal and team levels. We’re proud to share with you the accomplishments of DDIS throughout 2023!

People

We are also so pleased to welcome Daan as a PhD student working on the SNSF D3: Digital Deliberative Democracy project.

Research

Our research was published across a range of conferences and journals:

Grants & Scholarships

Rosni was awarded the AAAI 2023 Student Scholarship and Volunteer Program and Lucien the GRC Travel Grant! Also, Athina and Fynn were selected for the DSI Excellence Program!

Events

During 2023, we organized and participated in numerous events! Specifically:

Student Theses and Projects

The UZH student Konstantina Timoleon helped us to further improve the script of the Advanced Topics in AI lecture.

Additionally, the following master students completed their theses in DDIS:

  • Zhiruo Zhang – Answer Aggregation and Verbalization for Complex Question Answering
  • Domenic Fürer – Multimodal Feature Spaces
  • Jan Willi – Unified Multimedia Segmentation
  • Nina Willis – Human Perception and Memory in Interactive Video Retrieval

Finally, in 2023 3 BSc theses and 5 Master Projects were completed under DDIS supervision!

May 2024 be prosperous!

Abgelegt unter: Allgemein
Tags:

Winner in ISWC 2023 Challenge

3. December 2023 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on Winner in ISWC 2023 Challenge

We are very excited to share that our colleague Ruijie Wang won The Scholarly QALD 2023: Semantic Web Challenge on Question Answering over Linked Data organized in the 22nd International Semantic Web Conference! Congratulations!

Ruijie implemented NLQxform, a question-answering system to answer natural language questions on scholarly knowledge graphs. The system integrates a fine-tuned transformed-based BART model to translate natural language questions to SPARQL queries. Check out the NLQxform poster for more information!

Abgelegt unter: Allgemein
Tags:

New Article in Nature Scientific Reports

8. August 2023 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on New Article in Nature Scientific Reports

The article “Active querying approach to epidemic source detection on contact networks” has been published in Nature Scientific Reports by DDIS alumni Dr. Martin Sterchi in collaboration with Lorenz Hilfiker, Rolf Grütter & Abraham Bernstein!

The paper’s problem of interest is the identification of an epidemic’s patient zero given a network of contacts and a set of infected individuals, under the assumptions that the infection states of only a few individuals are initially observed and the epidemic has evolved. To tackle this issue, they formulate the problem as an active querying problem and propose a number of active querying strategies inspired by active learning. Their results suggest that in the limited information scenario it is possible to achieve source inference performance comparable to when the infection states of all individuals are observed.

Abgelegt unter: AllgemeinArtificial IntelligenceDDIS-PeopleLarge-scale graph processingPublications
Tags:

Congratulations to Dr. Tobias Grubenmann

5. June 2023 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on Congratulations to Dr. Tobias Grubenmann

We are delighted to congratulate our former colleague Dr. Tobias Grubenmann for becoming a Lecturer at the Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, United Kingdom!

Tobias pursued his PhD on “Monetization Strategies for the Web of Data” at DDIS.

We wish him a great start and all the best in his future endeavours!

Abgelegt unter: DDIS-People

New Paper in AAAI ’23

21. February 2023 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on New Paper in AAAI ’23

A paper based on controllable models for simplifying medical text, co-authored by our colleague Rosni Kottekulam Vasu and external collaborators, was accepted at the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence! The paper is titled “Med-EASi: Finely Annotated Dataset and Models for Controllable Simplification of Medical Texts” and was jointly conducted with Chandrayee Basu, Michihiro Yasunaga from Stanford University, and Qian Yang from Cornell University.

The paper’s vision is an interactive automatic medical text simplification system, which can enable medical practitioners and patients to simplify the contents of a text or conversation selectively and have controllability over the type of desired textual transformations.

Rosni presented the work at AAAI, orally and on a poster and was accepted to the 2023 AAAI student scholarship and volunteer program. Congratulations!

Abgelegt unter: Artificial IntelligenceConferenceDDIS-PeopleMachine LearningPublications
Tags:

Award for Paper Based on Student Thesis

25. January 2023 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on Award for Paper Based on Student Thesis

In his Bachelor Thesis, Viktor Lakic investigated the decay happening in datasets when the resources that Web-URLs point to become unavailable. This Link-Rot can cause problems for reproducibility, as datasets can shrink over time, potentially changing the outcome of experiments which use them. A paper based on the data that Viktor collected in his thesis, co-authored by Luca Rossetto and Abraham Bernstein, was recently presented at the 2023 International Conference on Multimedia Modeling in the Special Session on ‘Multimedia Datasets for Repeatable Experimentation’. The paper was awarded the ‘Best Special Session Paper Award’, honoring the best contribution across all special sessions of the conference. Congratulations!

Abgelegt unter: AwardsConferenceDDIS-PeopleMultimediaPublications
Tags:

2022: A Year In Review

31. December 2022 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on 2022: A Year In Review

As 2022 draws to a close, we look back onto a year of many achievements, both individually and as a team. 2022 has been a special year for the DDIS group as we celebrated our 20th anniversary! Fittingly for this milestone, we’ve celebrated three successful PhD defences and welcomed five new members to our team. We’re proud to share with you this year’s accomplishments and hope that 2023 will be just as exciting!

People

In 2022, three members of the DDIS group successfully defended their PhD Thesis!

In February, Suzanne defended her thesis “The Right Thing To Do? Artificial Intelligence for Ethical Decision Making”. She has since joined the University of Hamburg as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Bittner.

Matthias successfully defended his thesis “How to Compare Apples to Oranges: Integrating Heterogeneous Data Sources with Representation Learning” in August.

Finally, in November, Martin defended his thesis “Epidemic Spreading on Networks” and he is currently a lecturer for Business Analytics at the School of Business FHNW.

We wish them all the best in their future endeavours! 

In the past few months, we were also pleased to welcome Oana as a postdoctoral researcher, as well as Svenja, Athina, Fynn, and Mikla as PhD students!

Research & Projects

Our research, ranging from multimedia retrieval and crowdsourcing to digital democracy and responsible AI, got published in a variety of conferences and journals:

Moreover, the MediaGraph SNSF Ambizione and the Digital Deliberative Democracy (D^3) SNSF Sinergia projects have successfully started!

Grants

  • Cristina and Lucien received a SNSF Scientific Exchange Grant.
  • Cristina, Oana, Luca, and Prof. Bernstein received a UZH Teaching Innovation Fund to extend the Speakeasy platform.
  • Cristina and Lucien, together with external colleagues, received a GRC Short Grant.
  • Lucien completed the DSI Excellence Program.

Events

Throughout 2022, we had the opportunity to organise and participate in numerous events, in particular:

Student Theses and Projects

The UZH student Jan Will is working with Cristina and Rosni on the CrowdAlytics Annotation Framework v2.0. Additionally, in collaboration with Cristina and Luca, Jan is extending the Speakeasy platform.

Moreover the UZH student Laurin van den Bergh is working with Cristina and Luca on the script of the Advanced Topics in AI lecture.

Additionally, the following master students completed their theses in DDIS:

  • Vasiliki Arpatzoglou – Autonomous Car Acceptance
  • Fan Feng – Natural Language Question Answering via Knowledge Graph Reasoning
  • Emanuel Graf – Conversational Crowdsourcing for hypothesis generation in data science
  • Lutharsanen Kunam – High Level Semantic Video Understanding
  • Lukas Yu – Style Transfer Algorithm for Online News

Finally, in 2022 we supervised 4 BSc theses and 2 Master Projects!

Happy New Year 2023!

Abgelegt unter: Allgemein
Tags:

Teaching Innovation Fund Granted to DDIS!  

20. December 2022 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on Teaching Innovation Fund Granted to DDIS!  

Throughout our Advanced Topics in AI (ATAI) lecture, we introduce topics that explain the interplay between purely automatic AI methods and hybrid human-machine methods, emphasizing the importance of not only effective and efficient AI, but also responsible AI. Throughout the lecture, students have the opportunity to work on a practical project, in which they implement a conversational agent that uses the different technologies introduced in the lecture. At the end of the lecture, we organize an evaluation campaign in which all students can test their implemented conversational agent with real users – that being other students, or teaching assistants involved in the lecture. 

In order to facilitate and coordinate this evaluation campaign, we implemented a Web-based software infrastructure – dubbed Alan’s Speakeasy – that provides a graphical interface for human users to connect and have conversations in chatrooms and allows students to connect their conversational agents. Speakeasy also allows students to evaluate the conversational agents they talk to, using a survey that asks users to assess the accuracy of the conversational agents.   

We are honored to have been granted new funding by the UZH Teaching Fund via the innovation program that will allow us to extend the scope of Speakeasy. This project has a two-fold goal: Firstly, we would like to extend the implementation of the current software infrastructure – Speakeasy – to incorporate further features that will make the software more usable and more elaborate for running evaluation campaigns for conversational agents within the ATAI class.  Secondly, we would like to expand the scope of our software to reach a larger audience. Specifically, we would like to make our software useful for other organizations. We would like other research groups working on various aspects of AI (inside and outside UZH) to be able to reuse our software for teaching practical aspects of AI. 

Abgelegt unter: Artificial IntelligenceAwardsDDIS-PeopleFundsTeaching
Tags:

Liquid Democracy Workshop – Call For Papers

21. October 2022 | Athina Kyriakou | Comments Off on Liquid Democracy Workshop – Call For Papers

Our colleagues Lucien Heitz and Cristina Sarasua are co-organizing the first interdisciplinary workshop on liquid democracy together with Manon Revel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Chiara Valsangiacomo (University of Zurich and member of DemocracyNet). The workshop will be held at the University of Zurich on December 15 and 16, 2022!

During the event, there will be paper and poster sessions and a roundtable with four experts in the field: Prof. Karsten Donnay (University of Zurich), Prof. Bryan Alexander Ford (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), Prof. Davide Grosse (University of Groningen), and Prof. Christina Zuber (University of Konstanz).  

We welcome junior and senior researchers working in related disciplines, including political science, computer science, law, psychology, and/or sociology to apply. 

The call for contributions is open until October 30, 2022. You can submit: 

  • A paper abstract (max. 10,000 characters)
  • A poster description (max. 10,000 characters)
  • A motivation statement, if you would like to participate in the workshop but do not have a paper or a poster to present (max. 300 characters)

To submit your paper / poster, or register as a participant with a motivation statement, please fill in this application form.

This event is sponsored by the Graduate Campus of the University of Zurich, the doctoral program Democracy Studies, as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation

We are looking forward to welcoming you to Zurich!

Abgelegt unter: DDIS-PeopleDemocracyWorkshop

Dagstuhl Seminar “Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society”

29. September 2022 | cristina_sarasua | Comments Off on Dagstuhl Seminar “Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society”

Earlier this month, DDIS members Fynn Bachmann, Miklovana Tuci, Cristina Sarasua and Prof. Abraham Bernstein joined a seminar on “Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society” at Dagstuhl. The seminar was co-organized by Prof. Bernstein, Anita Gohdes, Steffen Staab, and Beth Noveck.

For five days, scholars in computer science, political science, law, and communication sciences discussed current challenges and future opportunities of online participation, political communication, and online deliberation.

Abgelegt unter: AllgemeinCollective IntelligenceConferenceDDIS-PeopleDemocracy