Thesis Archives - Human-Computer Interaction & Visual Analyitics Reasearch Group (vis) at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h

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

18/09/2020/in Allgemein, h_da, Teaching, Thesis /by Dirk Burkhardt

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.

Prof. Dr. Kawa Nazemi elevated to IEEE Senior Member

25/06/2020/in Allgemein, h_da, Research, Technology, Thesis /by Kawa Nazemi

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

10/06/2020/in Allgemein, h_da, Research, Technology, Thesis /by Dirk Burkhardt

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/.

Paper accepted at VARE 2019

21/06/2019/in Allgemein, Publication, Research, Scitics, Thesis /by Dirk Burkhardt

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

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

05/12/2018/in Allgemein, Teaching, Thesis, TU Darmstadt /by Dirk Burkhardt

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.

Thesis Presentation: Visual Trend Analysis on Digital Semantic Library Data for Innovation Management

08/11/2018/in Allgemein, Demo, Scitics, Teaching, Technology, Thesis, TU Darmstadt /by Dirk Burkhardt

When: 12/11/2018 16:00 Where: Frauhofer IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, Room 0.73 Who: Ranveer Purey (Author), Dipl.-Inf. Dirk Burkhardt (Coordinator/Co-Supervisor), Prof. Dr. Arjan Kuijper (Supervisor) What: Master Thesis – “Visual Trend Analysis on Digital Semantic Library Data for Innovation Management” Abstract: The amount of scientific data published online has been witnessing massive growth in the recent years. This has led to exponential growth in the amount of data stored in digital libraries (DLs) such as springer, eurographics, digital bibliography and library Project (dblp), etc. One of the major challenges is to prevent users from getting lost in irrelevant search results, when they try to retrieve information in order to get meaningful insights from these digital libraries. This problem is known as information overload. Other challenge is the quality of data in digital libraries. A quality of data can be affected by factors such as missing information, absence of links to external databases or data is not well structured, and the data is not semantically annotated. Apart from data quality, one more challenge is the fact that, there are tools available which help users in retrieving and visualizing the information from large data sets, but these tools lack one or the other basic requirements like data mining, visualizations, interaction techniques etc. These issues and challenges have led to increase in the research in the field of visual analytics, it is a combination of data processing, information visualization, and human computer interaction disciplines. The main goal of this thesis is to overcome the information overload problem and the challenges mentioned above. This can be achieved by using digital library named SciGraph by springer, which serves as a very rich source of semantically annotated data. The data from SciGraph can be used in combination with data integration, data mining and information visualization techniques in order to aid users in decision making process and perform visual trend analysis on digital semantic library data. This concept would be designed and developed as a part of innovation management process, which helps transforming innovative ideas into reality using a structured process. In this thesis, a conceptual model for performing visual trend analysis on digital semantic library data as part of innovation management process had been proposed and implemented. In order to create the conceptual model, several disciplines such as human computer interaction, trend detection methods, user centered design, user experience and innovation management have been researched upon. In addition, evaluation of various information visualization tools for digital libraries has been carried out in order to find out and address the challenges faced by these tools. The conceptual model proposed in this thesis, combines the usage of semantic data with information visualization process and also follows structured innovation management process, in order to ensure that the concept and implementation (proof of concept) are valid, usable and valuable to the user.

Thesis Presentation: Automated User Evaluation Analysis for a Simplified and Continuous Software Development

24/06/2018/in SmartEval, Teaching, Thesis, TU Darmstadt /by Dirk Burkhardt

When: 26/06/2018 16:00 Where: Frauhofer IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, Room 324 Who: Akshay Madhav Deshmukh (Author), Dipl.-Inf. Dirk Burkhardt (Coordinator/Co-Supervisor), Prof. Dr. Arjan Kuijper (Supervisor) What: Master Thesis – “Automated User Evaluation Analysis for a Simplified and Continuous Software Development” Abstract: In today’s world, computers are tightly coupled with the internet and play a vital role in the development of business and various aspects of human lives. Hence, developing a quality user-computer interface has become a major challenge. Well-designed programs that are easily usable by users are moulded through a regress development life cycle. To ensure a user friendly interface, the interface has to be well designed and need to support smart interaction features. User interface can become an Archilles heel in a developed system because of the simple design mistakes which causes critical interaction problems which eventually leads to massive loss of attractiveness in the system. To overcome this problem, regular and consistent user evaluations have to be carried out to ensure the usability of the system. The importance of an evaluation for the development of a system is well known. Most of the today’s existing approaches necessitate the users to carry out an evaluation in a laboratory. Evaluators are compelled to dedicate the time in informing the participants about the evaluation process and providing a clear understanding of the questionnaires during the experiment. At the post experiment phase, evaluators have to invest a huge amount of time in generating a result report. On the whole, most of the today’s existing evaluation approaches hogs up too much of time for most developments. The main aim of this thesis is to develop an automated evaluation management and result analysis, based on a previous developed web-based evaluation system, which enables to elaborate the evaluation results and identify required changes on the developed system. The major idea is that an evaluation can be prepared once and repeated in regular time intervals with different user groups. The automated evaluation result analysis allows to easily check if the continued development lead to better results and if a bunch of given task could be better solved e.g. by added new functions or through enhanced presentation. Within the scope of this work, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) was researched, in particular towards User-Centered Design (UCD) and User Evaluation. Different approaches for an evaluation were researched in particular towards an evaluation through expert analysis and user participation. Existing evaluation strategies and solutions, inclined towards distributed evaluations in the form of practical as well as survey based evaluation methods were researched. A proof of concept of an automated evaluation result analysis that enables an easy detection of gaps and improvements in the system was implemented. Finally, the results of the research project Smarter Privacy were compared with the manual performed evaluation.