News

From September 23rd-25th, the research groups of Prof. Mädche and Prof. Weinhardt invite for the ABBA Summer School Seminar at the KD²Lab. The summer school seminar is offered as part of the ABBA project. In this seminar, we give students the opportunity to leverage biosignal sensor and GenAI technologies for designing advanced biosignal-adaptive GenAI systems. This three-day program is designed for both bachelor’s and master's students. 

Part of the IM chair recently attended the first Sustainable Energy Education Conference (SEED) in Valencia. Christina Speck shared her research on public sentiments in Germany regarding the energy crisis, providing a basis for tailored energy education. Thimo Schulz presented EnerGPT, a customized ChatGPT aimed at improving household energy literacy. The conference highlighted the importance of addressing diverse public needs in energy education and showcased innovative solutions for enhancing energy literacy.

We are pleased to welcome Philipp Fritz as a new team member and doctoral student researcher at the Chair of Prof. Weinhardt at IISM. Philipp completed his master's thesis at our chair, investigating how Serious Games can enhance the Energy Literacy of households. During his master's program, he also contributed to the SOSEC project as a student researcher, focusing on energy and climate-related topics. Philipp now joins the “Smart Grids & Energy Markets” research group, where he will be concentrating on the collaboration between energy research and the energy industry within the scope of the NFDI4Energy project.

Dr. Jonas Fegert had the opportunity to attend the “Forum on the Transformation of Society” at Bellevue Palace on July 10th, where Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave a keynote speech on the digital public sphere and AI.

The International Conference on European Energy Markets (EEM) in Istanbul welcomed contributions from the ASSUME team. Four papers developed using the open-source, agent-based simulation toolbox were accepted, allowing developers Nick Harder, Florian Maurer, Manish Khanra, and Kim K. Miskiw to showcase their latest advancements. Highlights included the introduction of advanced order types like block bids, a comprehensive comparison with the agent-based model Amiris, insights into steel plant flexibility, and a discussion on the application of explainable reinforcement learning in a multi-agent setting.

In a guest commentary for Tagesspiegel, experts from the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and the KIT, Dr. Jonas Fegert, Prof. Dr. Christof Weinhardt, and Prof. Dr. Achim Rettinger, emphasize the importance of ensuring AI technologies do not worsen societal conflicts. The authors discuss the pervasive impact of AI on daily life and democracy, highlighting the urgent need for ethical and responsible AI deployment. 

The first two events of our international seminar "Bio-signals in Information Systems and Marketing" were thrilling! The supervisors from both universities, KIT and Politecnico di Milano, were able to travel to each other's cities along with the participating seminar students. We attended interesting lectures by experts in various fields of Bio-signals and also found time for fun and tourism (not to mention the excellent Italian food). Applications are still open for the upcoming events: https://im.iism.kit.edu/3549_3748.php

Our IISM team members Carolin Stein and Fabio Stano had the honour of presenting their research in Cyprus. Carolin gave a talk on the topic "Bridging Realities: Exploring Enablement Factors for XR Participatory Urban Planning", while Fabio presented his work on "Towards EEG-Based Decision Support Systems: Externalizing Neural Information to Assist Economic Decisions“. Both PhD students received valuable feedback and enjoyed the fruitful discussions and exchange with other researchers in the field.

Our IISM team members Michael Knierim, Thimo Schultz and Fabio Stano just attended the NeuroIS conference hosted at the Schloss Wilhelminenberg in Vienna - as always a great venue for scientific exchange. Thimo and Fabio presented their projects „How Generative-AI-Assistance Impacts Cognitive Load During Knowledge Work: A Study Proposal“ and „Single-Trial Economic Decision Classification with Passive BCIs: A Pilot Study“ and discussed their work with other researchers in the field.

Recently, Dr. Jonas Fegert, Hendrik Lehmann, Lea Frühwirth and Emily Gossmann took part in a podium discussion at re:publica in Berlin,  presenting insights from our project SOSEC. Various perspectives on social polarization were discussed in the session. How do we measure polarization? How do we describe it journalistically? Can it be depicted? What are the socio-psychological drivers and where do the sociological dividing lines run? Based on the long-term study Social Sentiment in Times of Crises, the representative results on the social mood of citizens in Germany and the USA were presented to a large audience for the first time, categorized and discussed.

As part of the Hybrid Adaptive Systems & KD2 School activity, Prof. Dr. Louisa Kulke from Bremen University inspired the audience with her research on social attention, on 04.06.2024. She presented in-depth research on the topic of social social inhibition gaze, curated over several years. Her work travelled through experiments in several contexts & demographics: (a) development of social inhibition from childhood to adulthood, (b) differences in expression of social inhibition in people on the autism disorder spectrum and (c) comparing social inhibition between human-human and human-robot interaction, among other interesting studies.

On June 4th the first project review meeting of our EU-funded project “TWON – Twin of Online Social Networks” took place in Brussels. This was a great opportunity to reflect the first year of work in the consortium with our great partners from University of Amsterdam, University of Trier, Institut Josef Stefan, Robert-Koch-Institut, DialoguePerspectives e.V., FZI and KIT. We received valuable and encouraging feedback by Prof. Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield), José Manuel Gómez Pérez (Director Language Technology Research at expert.ai) and Ilona von Bethlenfalvy (European Commission).