07.02.20252024 Overview

Already more than one month into 2025, there is still time to reflect back on a year filled with numerous accomplishments, both on personal and team levels. We’re proud to share with you the accomplishments of DDIS throughout 2024!

People

• We want to welcome Pascal, who joined us as a PhD student working on the RareSim Project.
• This year we had to say goodbye to many people in the group, Dhivya, Florian, Narges, Svenja, Athina, and Luca, who we wish the best in their further endeavours. 

Research

Our group has published the following works last year:

• Florian, Rosni, Ruijie, Luca, Avi published a workshop paper Single-Label Multi-Modal Field of Research Classification at NLSP
• Florian, Rosni, Rujie, Luca, Avi published a full paper An Extended Evaluation of Single-Label Multi-Modal Field of Research Classification Using a Taxonomy-Based Metric at ESCW Satellite

• Luca, Cristina, and Avi published a full paper Estimating the Semantic Density of Visual Media at MM'24.

• Kathrin published a doctoral symposium paper Evaluating the Pros and Cons of Recommender Systems Explanations at RecSys.

• Oana and external collaborators published a journal paper Evaluating explainable social choice-based aggregation strategies for group recommendation in UMUAI.

• Narges, Oana, and Avi published a full paper Casual Users and Rational Choices within Differential Privacy at IEEE S&P.

• Oana and external collaborators published a full paper Adversarial Nibbler: An Open Red-Teaming Method for Identifying Diverse Harms in Text-to-Image Generation at FAccT.

• Rosni, Cristina, and Avi published a full paper SciHyp: A Fine-grained Dataset Describing Hypotheses and Their Components from Scientific Articles at ISWC.

• Ruijie, Luca, Michael Cochez, and Avi published a full paper QAGCN: Answering Multi-Relation Questions via Single-Step Implicit Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs at ESWC.

• Oana and external collaborators published a journal paper Framing is Mightier than the Sword: Detection of Episodic and Thematic Framing in News Media in HCJournal.

• Oana and external collaborators published a workshop paper ScrollyPOI: A Narrative-Driven Interactive Recommender System for Points-of-Interest Exploration and Explainability at ExUM (UMAP).

• Oana and external collaborators published a workshop paper Aligning Object Detector Bounding Boxes with Human Preference at ACVR (ECCV).

• Lucien, Luca, Avi, and external collaborators published a workshop paper Prompt-based Alignment of Headlines and Images Using OpenCLIP at MediaEval (MMM).

• Lucien, Luca, and Avi published a workshop paper An Empirical Exploration of Perceived Similarity between News Article Texts and Images at MediaEval (MMM).

• Lucien, Oana, and external collaborators published a short paper Recommendations for the Recommenders: Reflections on Prioritizing Diversity in the RecSys Challenge 

• Lucien, Avi, and external collaborators published a full paper Informfully – Research Platform for Reproducible User Studies at RecSys.

• Lucien, Oana, and external collaborators have a workshop paper IDEA – Informfully Dataset with Enhanced Attributes under publication at NORMalize (RecSys).

• Oana and external collaborators have a workshop paper Lexically-constrained automated prompt augmentation: A case study using adversarial T2I data under publication at SafeGenAI (NeurIPS).

• Luca, Ruijie, Florian, Kathrin, and Avi published a challenge paper LifeGraph 4 - Lifelog Retrieval using Multimodal Knowledge Graphs and Vision-Language Models at LSC (ICMR).

• Florian, Cristina, Avi, and a student published a demo paper Documents with Integrated Visually Annotated Arguments at COMMA.

• Florian, Cristina, Avi, and Chris Reed published a demo paper Toward the Argument Web of Science at COMMA.

• Florian, Cristina, Avi, and John Lawrence published a demo paper A Unified Benchmark for Argument Mining at COMMA.

• Fynn, Cristina, and Avi published a full paper Fast and Adaptive Questionnaires for Voting Advice Applications at ECML/PKDD

Events

The group have also attended the following events

• Rosni, Ruijie, Florian, and Avi attended ESWC 2024, where they won both best workshop paper and full paper awards.
• Lucien, Kathrin, and Avi participated in RecSys 2024 as presenters.
• Kathrin participated in the ACM Europe School of RecSys 2024.
• Rosni attended ISWC 2024 as a presenter and received a best resource paper nomination.
• Oana organized the 6th Workshop on Explainable User Models and Personalised Systems (ExUM) at UMAP'24 and served as an Inclusion & Accessibility organizer for RecSys 2024.
• Luca, Avi, and Lucien participated in MediaEval 2024 and received the Distinctive Mention Award.
• Florian participated in COMMA 2024, presenting three demos.
• Fynn presented a full paper at ECML 2024, presented an extended abstract at IC2S2 2024, presented an abstract at ECPR 2024, and gave a D3-Project presentation at the CIS Workshop on AI and Deliberation 2024.
• Fynn and Daan presented a poster/abstract at EDDY 2024.

Calls and Grants

• Rosni received the ISWC Student Travel Grant.
• Rosni was awarded the UZH Doc Mobility Grant.
• Avi secured a DIZH project call.
• Florian received a GRC Travel Grant for a two-week stay in Dundee.
• Daan was selected for the DSI Excellence Program, has been elected as PhD Representative of IfI, and has been elected as a member of the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics.

Thesis and Project Supervision

• Hasan A. Atak, Hongjie Guan, and Wenzhe Li completed a Master Project on "Full Stack Development for Cross-Platform News Recommendation App" under Lucien's supervision.
• Yuin Kwan Chan, Hongji Li, and Kerui Zeng worked on a Master Project titled "Automated Selection and Generation of Images for News Articles" supervised by Luca and Lucien.
• Julián Novoa Martín completed a Master Thesis on "Automated Discourse Quality Measure" under the supervision of Daan and Cristina.
• Wesley Müri and Yuru Jin conducted a Master Project on "Practical Applications of Large Language Models for Legal Use Cases" supervised by Daan, Cristina, and Fynn.
• Hasan A. Atak completed a Master Thesis titled "peopen (People's Pen): Automated Drafting of Swiss Popular Initiatives through Large Language Models" under Daan's supervision.
• Melanie Glaser, Qing Dai, and Jiachen Bao worked on a Master Project titled "Intelligent Scientific Paper Annotator" supervised by Rosni.
• Yingying Liu completed a Master Thesis on "Generating and Evaluating Explanations for Knowledge Graph-based Recommender Systems" under Kathrin's supervision.
• Artem Vasilev worked on a Master Thesis titled "Decoding Fairness and Acceptance of Explainable Recommender Systems in Educational IT Platforms" supervised by Kathrin.
• Pascal Severin Andermatt completed a Master Thesis on "Multilingual Question Generation from Knowledge Graphs" under Ruijie's supervision.
• Filippo Tomelleri and Lampros Mitsiogiannis worked on a Master Project titled "GNN2R+ : A GNN+LM Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering Framework" supervised by Ruijie.
• Guanyu Chen, Qingyue Chen, Yujue Chen, and Lanlan Yang completed a Master Project on "A Multistage Approach to Improving Diversity in Recommender Systems" under Oana and Lucien's supervision.
• Haozhe Luo completed a Master Thesis titled "DWARF: Disease-weighted network for attention map refinement" supervised by Oana.
• Roland Bischofsberger, Joris Schallar, and Daniel Ritter worked on a Master Project titled "Adaptive Questionnaires for Voting Advice Applications" under Fynn's supervision.
• Zehao Zhang and Zihan Liu completed a Master Project on "Front-End Enhancement of Online Discussion Platform CitizenOS" supervised by Fynn and Daan.
• Niels Zweifel completed a Bachelor Thesis titled "ML vs. IRT: Comparing Spatial Models for Political Survey Data" under Fynn's supervision.
• Foteini Psarra completed a Master Thesis on "KiaPolis: Comparing interactions options for Deliberative Wiki Surveys" supervised by Fynn.
• Jothicharan Jothibabu completed a Master Thesis titled "Active Learning for Voting Advice Applications" under Fynn's supervision.
• Kalil Buraleeh completed a Bachelor Thesis on "Using Scrollytelling to Visually Explain Dimensionality Reduction Algorithms" supervised by Fynn.
• Yourong Li completed a Master Thesis titled "Comparative Informativeness of User Ratings and Comments" under Fynn's supervision.

Projects

This year marks the start of the project RareSim, a collaboration between Avi, Oana, and Pascal.

We look forward to all the things 2025 will bring!