A new paper shines a light on the disparity in the interpretation of data which can lead researchers to different conclusions. Among the large list of authors is also Prof. Bernstein along with former colleague Michael Feldman. The article also received coverage from The Economist (paywall) which is encouraging to see since people outside of the direct field find the results worth reporting on.

In April, the 30th edition of the Web Conference took place virtually. Prof. Bernstein attended the conference together with Bibek Paudel, a former DDIS colleague and postdoctoral researcher at Stanford.

At the conference, Bibek presented their paper ‘Random Walks with Erasure: Diversifying Personalized Recommendations on Social and Information Networks’, where they focused on political content recommendation. The paper can be found here, the presentation is available here. We congratulate them on a successful publication and presentation!

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!

Congratulations to our colleague Romana Pernischova, who has been awarded a GRC Travel Grant of 2’800 CHF. With this grant, she will be able to visit the University of Aalborg in Denmark for a two-month research stay with the Database and Web Technologies Group co-led by Prof. Katja Hose. During her stay in spring 2021, she will be extending her Protege plugin ChImp with data summaries. We wish them a fruitful collaboration!

In the context of the Berlin Science Week 2020, Prof. Abraham Bernstein took part in a panel discussion on Mobile Health Applications. Among other topics, they discussed the benefits and possible risks of digital health applications. Prof. Bernstein mentioned the recent COVID app as a perfect example. For more details, the talk can be found here (discussion in German).

Last week, our colleague Romana Pernischova presented her paper titled ‘ChImp: Visualizing Ontology Changes and their Impact in Protégé’ at the workshop VOILA, colocated with ISWC 2020. Together with Mirko Serbak, Daniele Dell’Aglio, and Abraham Bernstein, she looked at the needs of ontology engineers and created Protege plugin ChImp to help visualize changes and their impact while editing ontologies. Because of COVID-19, the conference took place online. Luckily, her presentation was still a success and well received. The paper can be found here.

At the same conference, a group of DDIS members also presented a demo of a graph-based retrieval system for lifelogs. ‘LifeGraph’ was developed in the context of an international evaluation campaign which, due to some changes and delays caused by the pandemic, was held online only a week before ISWC. During the demo, conference attendees could get an impression of how such a graph exploration-based approach could be used to find particular events from the life of a lifelogger. The demo was nominated for ‘Best Demo’. More information on the inner workings of that approach can be found in the paper, authored by Luca Rossetto, Matthias Baumgartner, Narges Ashena, Florian Ruosch, Romana Pernisch, and Abraham Bernstein.

Abraham Bernstein was elected to the University Council of the University of Lucerne. The University Council is the University of Lucerne’s strategic management body. For the next four years, Prof. Bernstein will function in the council in an advisory capacity. More information can be found here.

The Swiss National Science Foundation’s National Research Programme 77 on the Digital Transformation, led by Abraham Bernstein, was successfully launched in a virtual kick-off meeting with more than 200 attendees. In this program, the risks and opportunities of digitalization will be researched. For more information, see the program’s website.

We are delighted to congratulate Carl Edwards for being accepted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where he will pursue a PhD.

Carl visited DDIS as an undergraduate research intern during the fall term of 2018 in the scope of the EuroScholars student exchange program.

During his stay at DDIS he worked on associating images with knowledge graph entities. He worked on building a dataset and extending our previous models to that new domain.

In his future studies, he is interested in continuing work on combining data of different types and applying them to accomplish interdomain tasks. He believes this will be critical for creating more generalizable models.

We wish Carl all the best for his future career.

During 24th to the 26th of March 2020, the Human Robot Interaction 2020 was supposed to take place in Cambridge, UK. Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was canceled and paper presentations happened online. Our colleague Suzanne Tolmeijer and her coauthors got their paper accepted called ‘Taxonomy of Trust-Relevant Failures and Mitigation Strategies‘. The presentation of the paper can be found here. The paper received an honorable mention.

In the paper, Suzanne and team develop a taxonomy to categorize HRI failure types and their impact on trust. A risk score is introduced, as well as possible mitigation strategies to handle trust breaks of the user in a robotic system. The collaboration for this paper was a result of a workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl on ‘Ethics and Trust: Principles, Verification and Validation‘.