DBIS

Web Science is an advanced interdisciplinary field that intersects computer science, mathematics, sociology, economics, and other fields.

This seminar explores aspects of the World Wide Web, focusing on cutting-edge research in Web Analytics, Web Engineering, and aspects of Web Science that may lead to thesis topics for students.
The seminar covers a variety of areas such as algorithms and research for social aspects of the web such as recommender systems, social network analysis, and data mining as well as chatbots. A large part then is the educational web with mixed reality and psychomotor learning and the detection of academic trends. Lastly, software development trends are covered for web trust & credibility, web APIs & protocols, web-based software development models, and data security.

Knowledge Graphs are large graphs used to capture information about the real world in such a way that is is useful for applications. In these data structures, there are all sorts of entities (for example, people, events, places, organizations, etc.). Knowledge Graphs are used by many organizations to represent the information they need for their operations. The most well-known example is Google, where a knowledge graph is used to enrich the search results. Also personal assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Now, as well as question answering systems such as IBM Watson, make use of knowledge graphs to provide information to their users.

Besides these, also other information graphs, are in use by large organizations to improve or personalize their services. Examples include the Facebook graph, the Amazon product graph, and the Thompson Reuters Knowledge Graph.

The graph also contains all sorts of information about these entities (e.g., age, opening hours, …) and relations between them (e.g., “this shop is located in Aachen”). Furthermore, it may contain context information (e.g., the source of some information) and schema information or background knowledge (e.g., “shops have opening hours”).

Deliverables of this seminar

This seminar consists of an introductory course on Knowledge Graphs. You will give a short outline presentation on your assigned topic to set overview and expectations about the paper you’re going to write. The main deliverable of the seminar is a paper that describes the state of the art of your assigned topic. While you do not need to contribute original research, your task is to show the scientific competences of literature research, presentation of a research question and understanding and putting relevant papers into context. Furthermore, you are asked to critically assess and compare strengths or challenges of existing solutions. You will review your peer’s papers and give relevant feedback to enhance your scientific writing skills. You will present your paper in a final presentation in a block seminar at the end of the semester.

This seminar is about new and emerging approaches to adjust and balance privacy and utility in data intensive applications, such as information retrieval, data mining and personalisation. These new approaches have the potential to enable a new generation of privacy-enabled services which are not focused on maximizing the collection of user data. Instead these new approaches enable user privacy under different threat models, such as protecting the identity of individual users when querying aggregated data, or preventing leakage of query patterns when users retrieve data from a database. As a result, these new approaches may help businesses in their compliance with increasingly regulatory trust and reinforce user trust, while enabling new business models at the same time.