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.

Social Computing embodies the intricate interplay between evolving computational systems and dynamic societal behaviors. This field examines how technology can be crafted to interpret and enhance human interactions and observes these systems’ transformative influence on our social fabric.

Health data analytics is one of the main drivers for the future of medicine. Various sources of big data, including patient records, diagnostic images, genomic data, wearable sensors, are being generated in our everyday life by health care practitioners, researchers, and patients themselves. Data science aims to identify patterns, discovering the underlying cause of diseases and well being by analyzing this data.

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.

Web Science has become an interdisciplinary study field between computer science, mathematics, sociology, economics, and other disciplines. This seminar researches advanced Web Analytics and Web Engineering topics in Web Science probably leading to master thesis topics for excellent students. Topics include: network evolution models and network dynamics, (overlapping) community detection, recommender systems, adaptation and personalization in Web Environments, the Educational Web, Web Trust & Credibility, Web Protocols, Peer-to-Peer Networking for Web Clients, Web-based Software Development Models, particular Web Development methods like Web Components and many more. Students do not only learn to write and present scientific papers but also to peer review them. Students will be assigned to a supervisor helping the student through all steps like literature research, seminar paper and seminar presentation.

Organizations in many domains, such as manufacturing or healthcare, have a huge demand to exchange data to enable new services, drive research and innovation, or improve patient care.
Hence, organizations require alliance-driven infrastructures capable of supporting controlled data exchange across diverse stakeholders and transparent data management. Data Ecosystems are distributed, open, and adaptive information systems with the characteristics of being self-organizing, scalable, and sustainable trying to fulfil these requirements.
But there are many open issues, which make the exchange on a technological, processual, and organizational level a challenge. In this seminar, we will identify and discuss the main challenges in data ecosystems, such as data quality, data transparency, and data integration.

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.

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.