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:

• Athina, Oana, Prof. Bernstein, and externals published the work Algorithmically Mediated User Relations: Exploring Data’s Relationality in Recommender Systems (Regulatable ML Workshop, NeurIPS ‘23)
• Florian, Cristina, and Prof. Bernstein published the paper DREAM: Deployment of Recombination and Ensembles in Argument Mining (EMNLP ‘23)
• Kathrin and Oana collaborated with externals on the project Interaction Tasks for Explainable Recommender Systems (Eurovis ‘23)
• Luca together with externals published the papers:
  • Comparing Interactive Retrieval Approaches at the Lifelog Search Challenge 2021 (IEEE Access)
  • Exploring Effective Interactive Text-Based Video Search in vitrivr (MMM ‘23 VBS)
  • Traceable Asynchronous Workflows in Video Retrieval with vitrivr-VR (MMM ‘23 VBS)
  • A Comparison of Video Browsing Performance between Desktop and Virtual Reality Interfaces (ICMR ‘23)
  • The Best of Both Worlds: Lifelog Retrieval with a Desktop-Virtual Reality Hybrid System (ICMR ‘23 LSC)
  • Gesture retrieval and its application to the study of multimodal communication (International Journal on Digital Libraries)
  • Interactive video retrieval in the age of effective joint embedding deep models: lessons from the 11th VBS (Multimedia Systems Journal)
  • Novice-Friendly Text-based Video Search with vitrivr (CBMI’23)
  • Spatially Localised Immersive Contemporary and Historic Photo Presentation on Mobile Devices in Augmented Reality (SUMAC’23)
• Luca, along with Oana, Svenja, Florian, Ruijie, and Prof. Bernstein participated in the Lifelog Challenge with the work Multi-Mode Clustering for Graph-Based Lifelog Retrieval (ICMR ‘23 LSC)
• Lucien, Prof. Bernstein, and externals published the short paper Deliberative Diversity for News Recommendations: Operationalization and Experimental User Study (RecSys ‘23)
• Oana together with externals published the papers:
  • Collect, measure, repeat: Reliability factors for responsible AI data collection (best paper honorable mention, HCOMP ‘23)
  • Evaluating explainable social choice-based aggregation strategies for group recommendation (UMAP ‘23)
  • Viewpoint diversity in search results (ECIR ‘23)
  • Dataperf: Benchmarks for data-centric ai development (NeurIPS ‘23, Datasets and Benchmarks track)
• Rosni with externals published the work Med-EASi: Finely Annotated Dataset and Models for Controllable Simplification of Medical Texts (AAAI ‘23)
• Ruijie, together with UZH student Zhiruo Zhang, Luca, Florian, Prof. Bernstein and collaborated on the work NLQxform: A Language Model-based Question to SPARQL Transformer (Scholarly QALD@ISWC 2023)
• DDIS alumni Suzanne, together with UZH student Vasiliki Arpatzoglou, Luca, and Prof. Bernstein published the work Trolleys, crashes, and perception – a survey on how current autonomous vehicles debates invoke problematic expectations (AI and Ethics)
• UZH student Viktor Lakic, together with Luca, and Prof. Bernstein published the work Link-Rot in Web-Sourced Multimedia Datasets (best special session paper award MMM ‘23)

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:

• Cristina presented in the DigDem Workshop ‘23 
• Lucien and Prof. Bernstein participated in The Impact of Algorithm-Powered News Recommendation Systems (ICA ‘23) and co-organized NORMalize: The First Workshop on Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems (RecSys ’23)
• Luca co-organized the Video Browser Showdown (VBS) ‘23 and the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) ‘23
• Oana co-organized QUARE: 2nd Workshop on Measuring the Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems (RecSys ‘23), 5th Workshop on Explainable User Models and Personalised Systems (UMAP’23), The ART of Safety: Workshop on Adversarial testing and Red-Teaming for generative AI (AACL’23), and the Adversarial Nibbler challenge

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!

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!