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:
- Dhivya, Cristina, Prof. Bernstein, and Prof. Bacchelli published the paper Workflow Analysis of Data Science Code in Public GitHub Repositories in the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.
- Florian, Cristina, and Prof. Bernstein published the paper BAM: Benchmarking Argument Mining on Scientific Documents in the workshop proceedings in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
- Luca and external collaborators published the paper Interactive video retrieval evaluation at a distance: comparing sixteen interactive video search systems in a remote setting at the 10th Video Browser Showdown in the International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval, as well as the papers A Task Category Space for User-Centric Comparative Multimedia Search Evaluations, Multi-Modal Interactive Video Retrieval with Temporal Queries, and Multi-modal Video Retrieval in Virtual Reality with vitrivr-VR in the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling. Luca contributed also to the workshop paper vitrivr at the Lifelog Search Challenge 2022 at ACM ICMR. Moreover, together with Prof. Bernstein and external collaborators Luca published the paper An Asynchronous Scheme for the Distributed Evaluation of Interactive Multimedia Retrieval in the Workshop on Interactive Multimedia Retrieval at ACM Multimedia.
- Lucien, Suzanne, Prof. Bernstein, and external collaborators published the paper Benefits of Diverse News Recommendations for Democracy: A User Study in the Digital Journalism Journal.
- Lucien contributed to the Spotlight on Artificial Intelligence and Freedom of Expression: A Policy Manual, an initiative of the Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
- Matthias, Daniele, Prof. Bernstein, and external collaborators published the paper Towards the Web of Embeddings: Integrating multiple knowledge graph embedding spaces with FedCoder in the Journal of Web Semantics.
- Oana and external collaborators published the papers Comprehensive viewpoint representations for a deeper understanding of user interactions with debated topics in the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, Understanding the Role of Explanation Modality in AI-assisted Decision-making in the ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, and Humans disagree with the IoU for measuring object detector localization error in the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
- The student Alexander Theus together with Luca and Prof. Bernstein published the paper HyText-a Scene-Text Extraction Method for Video Retrieval in the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling.
- The student Lutharsanen Kunam together with Luca and Prof. Bernstein published their work A Multi-Stream Approach for Video Understanding in the Deep Video Understanding Challenge at ACM Multimedia.
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:
- Florian participated in the Dagstuhl workshop Towards a Unified Model of Scholarly Argumentation.
- Luca co-organised the 5th Lifelog Search Challenge Workshop at ACM ICMR, the Workshop on Interactive Multimedia Retrieval at ACM Multimedia, and the tutorial “Open Challenges of Interactive Video Search and Evaluation” at ACM Multimedia.
- Lucien participated in ICA 2022.
- Oana co-organized the Workshop on Explainable User Modeling and Personalized Systems as well as the Workshop on Measuring the Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems.
- Athina, Kathrin, Lucien, and Oana participated in the Lorentz Center workshop Diverse News Recommenders: from concept to implementation organised by Prof. Bernstein and external colleagues.
- Cristina, Fynn, Mikla, and Prof. Bernstein co-organised the Dagstuhl workshop Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society. Also, Cristina, Fynn, and Mikla participated in the Digital Democracy Workshop and together with Lucien organised the Liquid Democracy Workshop.
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!