It is safe to say 2020 was a surprise to everyone. Among many big events, the global pandemic has influenced us all. In academia, attention was diverted to online teaching and experiments from home to keep courses and research running. Despite all challenges thrown our way, DDIS has continued its activities. In fact, it was quite a productive and successful year for our group! Continue reading for some highlights..
Research
This year, an impressive amount of ten papers got published and six more got accepted in 2020 that were (co-)authored by DDIS members. Topics were very broad, ranging from ontology engineering, multimedia retrieval and crowdsourcing to machine ethics and diversity in news recommendations. Outlets ranged from top-tier conferences including ISWC and ICMR to journals such as ACM Computing Surveys.
Staff and Students
This year, we had to say goodbye to Postdoc Danielle Dell’Aglio, but for a good cause: he has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Data and Web technologies (DW) group at the Aalborg University. We had the fortune to welcome two new PhD students: Rosni Kottekulam Vasu joined in February to be part of the project ‘CrowdAlytics: Large-Scale Human-Machine Systems for Data Science‘, and Ruije Wang joined in September as part of the project ‘URPP Dynamics of Healthy Aging‘.
Over the course of this year, seven master students and four bachelor students successfully completed or are working on their thesis with DDIS. Among other topics were argument mining, knowledge graph driven text generation, mining data science code and person re-identification in and across videos. A selection of students also attended the first edition of the seminar on current trends in our research group.
Events
DDIS members were also active in different events this year. Rosni and Florian participated in Hackathon VersusVirus to work on solutions to challenges COVID-19 has posed on Swiss society. Rosni couldn’t get enough of coding and contributed with her group to HackZurich 2020 as well. In domain-specific workshops, Cristina contributed to the Data Science in Climate and Climate Impact Research workshop where she gave a talk on wikidata, while Suzanne, Lucien, Cristina and Prof. Bernstein attended a workshop on Digital Democracy. Lucien presented work on diverse political news recommendations. Luca even helped organize the 1st International Workshop on Interactive Multimedia Retrieval.
Other news
This year, Lucien has received a scholarship from the Excellence Program of the Digital Society Initiative. Romana also had success in her application for a GRC Travel Grant: she will travel to visit Aalborg University to collaborate with the DW research group.
Prof. Bernstein got appointed to be part of the University Council at the University of Bern.
The PigData project, part of NRP75 of the SNF, is coming to an end. It has been a successful project, with contributions by colleagues Martin, Malena, Cristina, and Prof. Bernstein.
In sum, 2020 has been a turbulent but productive year for DDIS. We wish everyone a pleasant remainder of 2020 and look forward to another year full of research in 2021!
