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. 

2018 has been a turbulent and exciting year, and has provided many opportunities to do exciting research. More and more data is being produced, which calls for data mining & machine learning to make sense of this data. Technology is becoming more ubiquitous, and research on human computer interaction & computer supported cooperative work helps transition more pleasantly into this technological area. When data has semantic knowledge captured in it, such as in the semantic web, large graph processing allows to use this enriched data. Increasingly, data is not just static anymore; stream processing deals with the continuous stream of new data being generated.

Events

There were many events DDIS organised or helped, including the following:

Conferences

• CI 2018 & HCOMP 2018 were cohosted at the University of Zurich. 
• At Wikicon, Cristina Sarasua gave a keynote talk and participated in the panel discussion, and was interviewed by the Luzerner Zeitung for the occasion. 

Workshops

• Invitation based workshop on stream reasoning , co-organized by Daniel Dell’Aglio
• CrowdBias 2018 @ HCOMP: Cristina Sarasua co-organized this workshop and edited the proceedings
• Web Stream Processing workshop @ WWW: Daniele Dell’Aglio co-organized this workshop and edited the proceedings.  
• Linked Data Experience workshop at DINAcon, co-organized by Cristina Sarasua

Hackathons

• Wikidata Datathon
• Wikidata Hackathon
• Swiss digital day hackathon
• Twist Hackdays co-located with Swiss Statistics Day, where Cristina Sarasua was part of the organization team led by the statistical offices of the canton and the city of Zurich. 

Other events

• SRF theme night: Dataland – the future of Switzerland, featuring Prof. Abraham Bernstein Ph.D.
• Wikidata meetup

Employees and Students

DDIS consists of senior staff, regular PhD students and PhD students in a joined cooperation with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL). Over the last year, DDIS has decreased its size due to successful PhD students graduating: Shen Gao, Michael Feldman, Tobias Grubenmann and Bibek Paudel. However, the trend will be increasing again, after two new PhD students joined: Narges Ashena and Romana Pernischová. In fact, we are currently looking for a postdoc and PhD student so, do not hesitate to message us if you are interested or forward it to someone who is!

Various courses were supported or provided by DDIS:

• Informatik und Wirtschaft (German, Bachelor course)
• Big data analytics (English, Master course)
• Practical artificial intelligence (English, Master course)
• Social computing (English, Bachelor course)
• Big Data: Technology and Law (English, Master course)
• Semantic web engineering (English, Master course)

Besides courses, the group offers the possibility to pursue master and bachelor theses, as well as master projects (which are part of the master’s program at the faculty). 

The television show in Swiss TV news can be found online.

The full article in the Swiss Daily Newspaper “Tages Anzeiger” can be found online and here.

The course “Informatik für Ökonomen” is an introductory course about Information Systems and their impact on the economy and society. You can learn more about the course in the video, which you can find at on YouTube or directly on the course’s home-page at Coursera.