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Midhad Blazevic defended his Master Thesis on Visual Search and Exploration for Scientific Publications through Similarity

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In his thesis, Midhad Blazevic alyzes exploratory search systems which use sophisticated features, visualizations and similarity-based algorithms to enhance exploratory searches. Examining how similarity algorithms are currently used in combination with elements from information retrieval, natural language processing and visualizations, but also examine what exploratory search is, what the requirements are and what makes it so special in modern times. Furthermore, the user himself or herself will be analyzed as user behavior during exploratory searches is a key factor that has to be taken into consideration when looking to optimize the exploratory search process overall. Based on these aspects, means of improvement will be developed and showcased, which will be used to determine if there is an improvement in comparison to other well-known systems. The outcome of this thesis will present a prototype of an exploratory search system along with a practical use case.

h_da is Partner of European University of Technology

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The Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) is part of the “European University of Technology” under the permission of the European Commission. The eight universities involved convinced the EU Commission with their vision of a networked European University. Together, the university partners want to improve their quality and competitiveness and promote European values ​​and identity. Numerous university members could benefit from the growing together of universities – students, for example, from better mutual recognition of academic achievements. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is one of the supporters of the project. The h_da is one of only two selected universities for applied sciences in Germany.

The consortium led by the Technical University of Troyes brings together 100,000 students and 12,000 employees. The alliance with the name “European University of Technology”, or “EUt +” for short, will initially receive funding of five million euros – with good prospects for additional EU funds. In a pilot project, the partners first want to work out the focal points of the cooperation. This could include facilitating the exchange of scientists over longer periods of time – as well as closer coordination of teaching content so that students can seamlessly take modules at a partner university. At the end of this development, there could even be joint European degrees. The background to the merger is the shared realization that global challenges such as climate change, resource overuse and growing inequality, as well as the social consequences of digitization, can only be solved together.

The European University of Technology consists of eight alliance members:

Further information

Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi elevated to IEEE Senior Member

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IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE has more than 423,000 members in more than 160 countries working to inspire a global community through publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities.

Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi has been elevated to senior member of IEEE. The IEEE Board of Directors announced this decision in a virtual meeting in June 2020.

The IEEE Senior Membership is only awarded to a very limited number of members who have contributed significantly to the further development or application of science and technology. Less than 8% of the members worldwide are awarded senior member status based on their merits in research, profession and teaching.

Master Student Interviewed toward her Thesis in Detection of Fake News with AI

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Mina Schütz wrote her master thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi und Prof. Dr. Melanie Siegel toward “Detection and Identification of Fake News: Binary Content Classification with a Pre-Trained Language Model” at Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), Center for Digital Safety & Security in Vienna. During her work she could successfully conceptualize and develop a system that enables classification of news with a high probability as fake or real on the basis of Artificial Intelligence algorithm. The work is a great product of scientific and empirical acting and will be published in the scientific world soon.

For her excellent work and the high societal relevance, the impact magazine of the h_da has interviewed her to outline the topic and her approach in a better understandable manner, particularly for non-computer-science experts. The full interview is available (in German only) on: https://impact.h-da.de/forschung/corona-und-fakenews/.

Call for Papers to the Collaborative European Research Conference 2020

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This year’s Collaborative European Research Conference (CERC) will take place with the support of scientists and members of our team. The 6th edition of the conference also aims at young academics and is primarily organized and held by the colleagues from Ulster University (Belfast, Northern Ireland). The conference will take place from 10-11 September 2020, but due to the Corona crisis, the conference will also take place for the first time, at least partially, in virtual form.

The CERC was held for the first time in 2010 by the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) and the Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) and was originally organized by lecturers from the IT department of these two institutions. The event, which takes place alternately every year at one of the partner universities, is deliberately interdisciplinary and the presented researches covers a wide range of topics – from bioinformatics to social history. This promotes the exchange of ideas between the specialist areas and thus the opportunity for new collaborations.

If you have interesting research results, you are invited to submit your paper by May 31st. Interested parties can also attend the conference without a submission. Please note the information on the website: https://www.cerc-conference.eu.

https://youtu.be/L4Z8DzAhD4g

Advanced Seminar toward Visual Analaytics in next Summer Semester at h_da/FBI (computer science)

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In the upcoming summer semester 2020, our doctoral students provide an advanced seminar at the department of computer science at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. The topic of the seminar will be toward “Visual Analytics for Smart Manufacturing and Trend Analysis”:

Due to the increasing digitization, analyzes are a constant necessity, which also applies to the identification of errors, problems or opportunities for improvement. With visual analytics, the combination of algorithmic and massive calculation opportunities of computer-based systems on the one side as well as the visual and cognitive skills of the users on the other side are used together. The seminar focuses on the use of visual analytics in the two current areas of smart manufacturing and trend analysis. On behalf of the given task, current approaches, methods and implementations should be researched and examined. The goal should be a scientific elaboration based on empirical and scientific standards.

Interested students are invited to register soon, since the number of places will be limited.

Due to virtual lecturing, please note the course information in Moodle!

Paper accepted at VARE 2019

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At the next conference in Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education (VARE 2019), we are happy that out paper toward mobile visual trend analytics was accepted for presentation. The conference takes place from Sep. 18 to Sep. 20, 2019 in Kisbon, Portugal. The VARE is an annual event that brings together trainers in all areas of knowledge and educational levels as well as researchers and scientists from virtual technologies as well data advanced visualization and virtualization. In general, main aim is to improve teaching and training, and data analysis through virtual and augmented technologies use and to discuss problems and solutions in mentioned areas to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research.

Paper: A Mobile Visual Analytics Approach for Instant Trend Analysis in Mobile Contexts

Abstract:
The awareness of market trends becomes relevant for a broad number of market branches, in particular the more they are challenged by the digitalization. Trend analysis solutions help business executives identifying upcoming trends early. But solid market analysis takes their time and are often not available on consulting or strategy discussions. This circumstance often leads to unproductive debates where no clear strategy, technology etc. could be identified. Therefore, we propose a mobile visual trend analysis approach that enables a quick trend analysis to identify at least the most relevant and irrelevant aspects to focus debates on the relevant options. To enable an analysis like this, the exhausting analysis on powerful workstations with large screens has to adopted to mobile devices within a mobile behavior. Our main contribution is the therefore a new approach of a mobile knowledge cockpit, which provides different analytical visualizations within and intuitive interaction design.

Link to paper/fulltext: -comming soon-

Demo video:

https://youtu.be/hHzO5upQeTg

Information Science: The new degree program at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences

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Digitization contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in immense amounts of data, but often unstructured and widely scattered. Information Scientists bring this knowledge together and make it usable for business and society. The new study program Information Science at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt (h_da) trains students to become experts in the professional handling of data, information and knowledge. The bachelor and master program starts for the first time in the winter semester 2019/20 and replaces the previous course Information Science. Applications are possible from the 15th of May.

“Since digitization processes and rapid technological changes have a major impact on companies, information scientists also contribute to future and innovation processes,” emphasizes Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi. He is in charge of the bachelor’s and master’s degree program Information Science. His graduates also qualify for leadership positions in companies, institutions, media organizations, administrations or libraries as well as for research activities. The master’s degree also qualifies for a doctorate. There are perspectives at the Hochschule Darmstadt in the cross-university doctoral program “Applied Computer Science”, in which research group is involved.

 

Information about the application and the admission requirements can be found at:
https://h-da.de/bewerben

Detailed information on the Information Science program can be found at:
https://iw.h-da.de/

Two papers in Journal of ICTE in Transportation and Logistics 2018

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We are glad to announce that two submission of us were accepted in the Elsevier journal Procedia Computer Science of ICTE in Transportation and Logistics 2018. The ICTE in Transportation and Logistics is an interdisciplinary annual issue operating on the edge between transportation, logistics and computer science. The aim of the journal is promotion of introduction the latest IT achievements and active research methods in transportation and logistics involving citizens in training and decision making through participation in social networking. The audience of the journal are academicians, municipalities, professional associations, public and private funded organizations, industry professionals, researchers and students. The accepted papers are:

#1 Visual analytical dashboards for comparative analytical tasks – a case study on mobility and transportation

Mobility, logistics and transportation are emerging fields of research and application. Humans’ mobility behavior plays an increasing role for societal challenges. Beside the societal challenges these areas are strongly related to technologies and innovations. Gathering information about emerging technologies plays an increasing role for the entire research in this ares. Humans’ information processing can be strongly supported by Visual Analytics that combines automatic modelling and interactive visualizations. The juxtapose orchestration of interactive visualization enables gathering more information in a shorter time. We propose in this paper an approach that goes beyond the established methods of dashboarding and enables visualizing different databases, data-sets and sub-sets of data with juxtaposed visual interfaces. Our approach should be seen as an expandable method. Our main contributions are an in-depth analysis of visual task models and an approach for juxtaposing visual layouts as visual dashboards to enable solving complex tasks. We illustrate our main outcome through a case study that investigates the area of mobility and illustrates how complex analytical tasks can be performed easily by combining different visual interfaces.

Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.01.117

#2 Visual legal analytics – A visual approach to analyze law-conflicts of e-Services for e-Mobility and transportation domain

The impact of the electromobility has next to the automotive industry also an increasing impact on the transportation and logistics domain. In particular the today’s starting switches to electronic trucks/scooter lead to massive changes in the organization and planning in this field. Public funding or tax reduction for environment friendly solutions forces also the growth of new mobility and transportation services. However, the vast changes in this domain and the high number of innovations of new technologies and services leads also into a critical legal uncertainty. The clarification of a legal status for a new technology or service can become cost intensive in a dimension that in particular startups could not invest. In this paper we therefore introduce a new approach to identify and analyze legal conflicts based on a business model or plan against existing laws. The intention is that an early awareness of critical legal aspect could enable an early adoption of the planned service to ensure its legality. Our main contribution is distinguished in two parts. Firstly, a new Norm-graph visualization approach to show laws and legal aspects in an easier understandable manner. And secondly, a Visual Legal Analytics approach to analyze legal conflicts e.g. on the basis of a business plans. The Visual Legal Analytics approach aims to provide a visual analysis interface to validate the automatically identified legal conflicts resulting from the pre-processing stage with a graphical overview about the derivation down to the law roots and the option to check the original sources to get further details. At the end analyst can so verify conflicts as relevant and resolve it by advancing e.g. the business plan or as irrelevant. An evaluation performed with lawyers has proofed our approach.

Link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2019.01.170

Thesis Presentation: User-Centered Scientific Publication Research and Exploration in Digital Libraries

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When: 10/12/2018 15:30 Where: Frauhofer IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, Room 220 Who: Namitha Chandrashekara (Author), Dipl.-Inf. Dirk Burkhardt (Advisor/Co-Supervisor), Prof. Dr. Arjan Kuijper (Supervisor) What: Master Thesis – “User-Centered Scientific Publication Research and Exploration in Digital Libraries” Abstract: Scientific research is the basis for innovations. Surveying the research papers is an essential step in the process of research. It is vital to elaborate the intended writing of state of the art. Due to the rapid growth in scientific and technical discoveries, there is an increasing availability of publications. The traditional method of publishing the research papers includes physical libraries and books. These become hard to document with the rise in the number of publications produced. Due to the above mentioned problem, online archives for scientific publications have become more prominent in the scientific community. The availability of the search engines and digital libraries help the researchers in identifying the scientific publications. However, they provide limited search capabilities and visual interface. Most of the search engines have a single field to search and provides basic filtering of the data. Therefore, even with popular search engines, it is hard for the user to survey the research papers as it limits the user to search based on simple keywords. The relationships across multiple fields of the publications are also not considered such as to find the related papers and papers based on the citations or references. The main aim of the thesis is to develop a visual access to the digital libraries based on the scientific research and exploration. It helps the user in writing scientific papers. A scientific research and exploration model is developed based on the previous information visualization model for visual trend analysis with digital libraries, and with consideration of the research process. The principles from Visual Seeking Mantra are incorporated to have an interactive user interface that enhances the user experience. In the scope of this work, a research on Human Computer Interaction, particularly considering the aspects of user interface design are done. An overview of the scientific research, its types and various aspects of data analysis are researched. Different research models, existing approaches and tools that help the researchers in literature survey are also researched. The architecture and the implementation details of scientific research and exploration that provides visual access to digital libraries are presented.

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