Contribution to FAZ podcast Artificial Intelligence

The financial sector is just one of many industries where artificial intelligence has found application. For example, AI is able to provide investors with better stock advice than traditional bank advisors. Yet successful AI application often fails in implementation: despite their accuracy, investors often ignore algorithmic stock advice because they lack the empathy to convince investors to make a decision. Professor Dr. Oliver Hinz talks about this problem as well as other potentials of artificial intelligence in the new edition of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

An article of the German newspaper FAZ about the podcast series can be found here: FAZ article.

ForeSight closing event

On 15.03.2023, the official closing event of the ForeSight research project took place in Berlin under the motto "ForeSight is the future of living". ForeSight is the largest research project in the field of Smart Living. It focuses on researching an open, AI-supported and Gaia-X-compatible standard and smart data space for the smart living market.

A central application of the ForeSight data space is predictive maintenance, i.e. the anticipatory and AI-supported maintenance of apartments. For this purpose, test apartments are equipped with sensors and other components for the purpose of data collection. These components include, among others, drones. You can view excerpts of the drone footage created in the following video:

ForeSight drone footage

SECAI research project on sustainable heating successfully launched

As part of the SECAI research project, the chair of Prof. Hinz is investigating the future of sustainable heating together with its consortium partners from industry and research. The acronym SECAI - derived from "Sustainable heating through Edge-Cloud-based AI systems" - underlines the fundamental success components of the project: the development of AI-based Edge-Cloud solutions that help to holistically optimize multi-family houses. The project originates from the "Edge data economy" funding line issued by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate and has been launched as of December 2022. The consortium consisting of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), ZVEI e.V., DBT Digital Building Technology GmbH & Co. KG (wibutler), GSW Gesellschaft für Siedlungs- und Wohnungsbau Baden-Württemberg mbH and Strategion GmbH. It combines the housing industry with expertise from AI research and development as well as know-how in edge cloud computing and heating. The project's goal is to sustainably optimize the heating of living spaces, especially of existing buildings, through the intelligent linking of technology, without the need for expensive and lengthy renovation work. The spatial construct of living is considered holistically - from the sensors in a room to the apartment to entire buildings or residential complexes. As a research partner, Prof. Hinz's chair is particularly available to the project in the context of requirements analysis, AI-based realization of incentive mechanisms, and scientific processing of studies.

Börsen-Zeitung: AI in the banking industry

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in the banking sector, whether in predicting the creditworthiness of loan applicants or in providing traditional banking advice. Nevertheless, the application of artificial intelligence without human supervision can have serious negative consequences.

Prof. Kevin Bauer, Prof. Oliver Hinz, Prof. Cathy Liu, and Prof. Xitong Li discuss how Artificial Intelligence applications can be used efficiently in the banking sector in a new article published by Börsen-Zeitung. The full article can be found here:

Outstanding Placement in Wirtschaftswoche Management-Ranking

Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz has achieved an excellent ranking in the well-known business administration research ranking of WirtschaftsWoche, which lists the most research-intensive business administrators in a five-year period every two years. In the period from 2018 to 2022, he reached 11th place among the more than 3,250 people included and is thus among the most research-intensive 0.4% of business administration researchers.

You can read the full article here: Wirtschaftswoche Management Ranking.

Schmalenbach-Prize 2022

The Schmalenbach Prize 2022 was awarded this year to Dr. Cristina Mihale-Wilson, research associate and post-doc at the Chair of Information Systems and Information Management. The Schmalenbach Prize is an award for outstanding scientific work in the field of business administration.

Dr. Mihale-Wilson received the award for her dissertation entitled "Contextual Antecedents and Consequences of Technology Adoption and Use," in which she examines contextual antecedents and consequences of the adoption and use of new technologies.

More information are in the following news article.

How to successfully sell your goods online – The Wall Street Journal

The online market for second-hand goods has seen a rapid increase in recent years - more and more people are choosing to purchase second-hand goods via digital marketplaces such as Ebay. The crucial question for sellers here is: What's the most successful way to sell your goods online?

The Wall Street Journal has dedicated an article to this question and also refers to the research results of Prof. Hinz. According to this, an important success factor is television: If an auction ends shortly after a special TV event like the Super Bowl, significantly lower auction prices are achieved. You can read the full article here:

Volkswagen Foundation AI research Grant for the Chair of Prof. Hinz

The Volkswagen Foundation has given the chair the opportunity to create a research proposal for a more extensive AI project. With this in mind, the foundation is funding the chair with an increased amount of money, which can be used to finance two additional employees and research equipment, among other things.

The application for the advanced research project "ML2MT" deals with the question of how people can benefit from AI not only as decision support systems in the short term, but also learn from the systems in the long term in order to improve their own skills. In particular and as a first step, this research idea is investigated in the area of medicine and healthcare. We are curious to see how the research on this topic and especially this project will develop further!

AI Research Grant of the BMWi for the Chair of Prof. Hinz

The project "ForeSight" praised by the BMWi, and in particular the sub-project of Prof. Hinz, has now received the grant notice. Due to its far-reaching implications for the economy, society and business, the project was initially found to be a winner in the AI competition and ultimately eligible for funding. The project aims at the implementation and research of an AI platform in the field of smart living, which is to fundamentally change the future of living and the industry built around it.

The subproject of Prof. Hinz focuses in particular on the socio-economic factors, human AI interaction, and the development of AI-based, context-specific services.  We congratulate Prof. Hinz on his funding and are looking forward to the results of his research!

Project ForeSight wins BMWi KI innovation contest

The winners of the KI-Innovationswettbewerb des Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi) were announced (further information can be found in the BMWi press release).

In addition to 15 other platform projects, the ForeSight project, in which our professorship will be involved, was also awarded.

The goal of ForeSight is to establish an AI-based platform for the development of innovative Smart Living services in the residential environment, especially on the basis of AI-based technologies. The aim is to create a new, connecting ecosystem for manufacturers, vendors and users from different industries that will also help overcome today's interoperability problems when using components from different vendors.

We are delighted by the award and look forward to the collaboration starting in 2020.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz joins the Editorial Board for MAKE

Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz has joined the Editorial Board of the journal Machine Learning & Knowledge Extraction (MAKE). MAKE is an open-access journal focusing on machine learning and its applications. More information about MAKE can be found here.

Best Paper Award for Katharina Keller at UbiComp 2019

Katharina Keller and her co-authors won the Best Paper Award at UbiComp 2019 as part of the 4th Workshop on Ubiquitous Personal Assistance.

Together with Kim Valerie Carl, Hendrik Jöntgen, Benjamin M. Abdel-Karim, Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser and Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz, she examines the following aspects in the paper "K.I.T.T., Where Are You? - Why Smart Assistance Systems in Cars Enrich People's Lives" examines possible factors influencing the intention to use smart assistance systems in cars.
 

 

 

Completion of the research project ENTOURAGE

The BMWI-funded research project ENTOURAGE, in which an open ecosystem for intelligent, secure and trustworthy assistance systems on the Internet of Things was developed, will be concluded on 11.09.2019 at the IAA.

Visitors from outside the project are welcome, but are requested to register in advance, otherwise no access to the exhibition grounds can be guaranteed.
Further information can be found on the project website.

Exciting calls for papers for the research area AI

We would like to inform you about these two exciting calls for papers for the research area AI for which Professor Hinz is holding a track chair and guest editor role respectively.

You can find additional information by clicking on their title.

Guest Editors:

Stefano Teso
Oliver Hinz

Machine learning is revolutionizing our ability to leverage data and tackle challenging applications such as machine translation, recommender systems, fraud detection, and medical diagnosis. Interactive learning supports these advances by casting learning as a dialogue between a model and one or more users, who may play the role of teachers, targets, and judges of the model being learned, and who can also learn as being part of the teaching-learning loop. Interactive learning encompasses different styles of interaction, from acquiring label and ranking information as in active learning and preference elicitation to exchanging structured supervision as in imitation learning. This allows the model to produce personalized predictions and recommendations and handle data-scarce settings by only querying for informative, targeted supervision.  Interaction is also required for establishing a mutual understanding between the model and the user, and in turn directability and trust.

 

Designing successful interactive learning schemes requires to solve a number of key challenges like minimizing the cognitive cost for the user while optimizing query informativeness, devising effective interaction protocols based on different types of queries (membership, ranking, search, explanation, etc.), producing optimal questions by explicitly and efficiently capturing the uncertainty of the model, distributing the load of query answering across multiple teachers with heterogeneous abilities, designing or estimating realistic models of user behavior, increasing tolerance to noise and actively guiding the user toward providing better and more robust supervision, and, more generally, automatically discovering the user's expertise level and adapting the interaction accordingly. Such an interaction is likely to help make such systems more transparent and the results more explainable.

 

Only then interactive learning will unlock unprecedented opportunities for both scientific research and commercial exploitation in Artificial Intelligence, Health Care, Environment and Climate, Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Agriculture, Social Web, Finance, e-Commerce, and Design, among other domains.

 

This special issue aims at surveying established research in interactive learning, as well as overviewing recent advances on algorithms, models and effective process design around humans in the loop.

 

If you are interested in contributing (technical reports, system descriptions, project reports, survey articles, discussions and dissertation abstracts) to this special issue, please contact one of the guest editors before the submission deadline.

 

Important dates:

Submission deadline: 1st of September 2019 Reviews / resubmission: November 2019

Publication: February 2020

Track Chairs

Benedikt Berger, LMU Munich

Alexander Benlian, TU Darmstadt

Kristian Kersting, TU Darmstadt

Oliver Hinz, Goethe University Frankfurt

 

Description

The advancement of machine learning algorithms, the availability of large amounts of data to feed these algorithms, and increasing processing power have enabled the successful application of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in the field. Among those are speech recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, predictive analytics, and robotics.

Developers can now draw upon these capabilities to improve existing systems (e.g., machine translation) or innovate new technologies (e.g., smart speaker). We refer to information systems incorporating AI capabilities as AI-based systems. AI-based systems affect the relationship between humans and machines in solving tasks. AI-based systems can assist humans in an increasing number of tasks or even solve them autonomously. Furthermore, AI capabilities allow systems to appear more humanly and thus create anthropomorphic perceptions (i.e., by interacting via speech). AI-based systems offer opportunities for businesses to become more efficient or to innovate new products and services. However, AI-based systems need to be designed and implemented carefully to avoid unwanted drawbacks such as discrimination through bias in automated decision making. These developments open up a wide array of questions at the individual, organizational and societal level. This track wants to contribute towards answering these questions and provide insights regarding the best possible design and use of AI-based systems. The track is open for contributions to the topic from all theoretical and methodological angles. We also welcome work regarding the use of AI capabilities for research purposes and the impact of AI on information system discipline.

 

Covered areas include, but are not limited to:

·         Hybrid and Augmented Intelligence

·         Human-AI-Collaboration (Human-in-the-loop)

·         AI-based Assistance Systems

·         Development, Design, and Implementation of AI-based Systems

·         Human-Robot-Interactions

·         (Over)Trust in AI-based Systems

·         Explainability and Transparency of AI-based Systems

·         Anthropomorphic Systems and Perceptions of Humanness

·         Business, Managerial, and Strategic Implications of AI

·         AI-based Data Analytics and Decision Making

·         AI-based Methods in IS Research

·         Relationship between AI and IS Research

·         Downsides of AI-based Systems: Bias, Discrimination, and Aversion

 

Associate Editors

·         Martin Adam, TU Darmstadt

·         Carsten Binnig, TU Darmstadt

·         Philipp Ebel, University of St. Gallen

·         Andreas Fink, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/UniBw Hamburg

·         Burkhardt Funk, Leuphana University of Lüneburg

·         Peter Gomber, Goethe University Frankfurt

·         Wolfgang König, Goethe University Frankfurt

·         Cristina Mihale-Wilson, Goethe University Frankfurt

·         Stefan Morana, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

·         Dirk Neumann, University of Freiburg

·         Sarah Oeste-Reiß, University of Kassel

·         Nicolas Pröllochs, University of Oxford

·         Matthias Schumann, University of Göttingen

·         Isabella Seeber, University of Innsbruck 

·         Kai Spohrer, University of Mannheim

 

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: August 16th, 2019

Submission deadline for revised papers: November 11th, 2019

 

For further information please visit www.wi2020.de/<http://www.wi2020.de/>

Quo vadis, Cloud Computing?

Differentiation is the buzzword to assert oneself as a smaller cloud provider against the big hyperscaler. An economic and technological outlook from Professor Hinz of the Goethe University in Frankfurt in the run-up to the "Cloud 2018 Technology & Services Conference" in September: cloudcomputing-insider.de

Continous availability harms concentration

Very interesting article on heise.de about smartphone usage after work and its consequences. Even our project Sandra is mentioned in the article.

The role of hyperscalers

The public cloud is firmly in control of hyperscalers. This endagers dependences and a "vendor-lockin". Oliver Hinz is of the mind that smaller providers can occupy niches.

The interview can be read here: it-business.de

Quo Vadis, Cloud Computing?

In the context of Hosting & Service Provider (HSP) Summit 2018 (17. - 18.05 in Frankfurt), Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz will expound economic and technical future prospects of the ASA-Service-Model.

Interview with Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz

The cloud market is faces technological and economic changes. In an interview in the forefront of the Hosting & Service Provider Summits 2018 Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz reveals for what provider need to be prepared.

The interview can be read here: cloudcomputing-insider.de

Interview with Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz about the current Facebook data affair

In a current article in Meinungsbarometer Prof. Dr. Oliver Hinz talks about the facebook data affair.

Season's Greetings

We wish all students, colleagues and staff of the Goethe University a Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2018! Please note, from December 27 - 29, the university is closed. We'll be back January 2nd onwards. - Your Chair of Information Systems and Information Management.

Christmas Meal
Chair Christmas
Recent publications

von Zahn, Moritz / Bauer, Kevin / Mihale-Wilson, Cristina / Jagow, Johanna / Speicher, Maximilian / Hinz, Oliver (2024): "Smart Green Nudging: Reducing Product Returns through Digital Footprints and Causal Machine Learning", Marketing Science, forthcoming.

Gnewuch, Ulrich / Morana, Stefan / Hinz, Oliver / Kellner, Ralf / Mädche, Alexander (2023): "More than a Bot? The Impact of Disclosing Human Involvement on Customer Interactions with Hybrid Service Agents", Information Systems Research, conditionally accepted.

Bauer, Kevin / von Zahn, Moritz / Hinz, Oliver (2023): "Expl(AI)ned: The Impact of Explainable Artificial Intelligence on Users’ Information Processing", Information Systems Research 34(4), 1582-1602. [View]

Top