Chronik Projekte
Aktuelle Projekte
WeightPal (seit 2020)
An Empathetic Conversational Agent for Weight Loss Treatment
The increasing rate of obesity in the German population calls for the development of new treatment options as a way to reduce costs on the public health care system and increase treatment success.
This project explores possibilities of automated empathetic conversation to support traditional obesity treatment. The constant availability of a conversational agent could solve problems related to weight loss as soon as they arise and help with impulse control. The non-judgemental nature of such a system as opposed to counsellors or peers has the potential to lower the user’s inhibitions and increase honesty in conversations about sensitive topics.
In the long term, such a conversational agent could be a valuable tool in the treatment and prevention of obesity.
Team:
- Selina Meyer, M.A.
- PD Dr. David Elsweiler
- Prof. Dr. Bernd Ludwig
Kontakt:
COURAGE (seit 2019)
A Social Media Companion Safeguarding and Educating Students
This project aims to develop a Social Media User's Virtual Companion that educates and supports teenage school students facing the treats of social media such as discrimination and biases also escalating to hate speech, bullying, fake news and other toxic content that can strongly affect the real world.
The Companion will raise awareness of potential threats in social media while still providing a satisfactory experience through the use of novel gamification strategies and educative information selection algorithms. Using hand defined gamification strategies based on the concept of interactive counter-narrative together with a learnt model of diffusion of biased, hateful and general toxic content on the social media, the companion will bootstrap learning of strategies for interaction and information selection.
These strategies will be refined and personalized for each user and his social niche with the dual aims of (A) improving and creating healthy social relationships between the user, his peers and the targets of bias, as well as(B) increasing their understanding of the social effects of toxic content in social media and the user role in its propagation.
Experimentation will use data mined from real social media and re-enact them for testing in restricted and controllable conditions (eg. schools, classes).
Team:
Kooperationspartner:
University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West (Bottrop, Germany)
L'Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche - CNR-ITD (Palermo, Italy)
University of Essex (Colchester, UK)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
Rhein-Ruhr Institute (RIAS), (Duisburg, Germany)
University of Milano-Bicocca (Milano, Italy)
F?rderung:
Ansprechpartner:
Information Needs in Natural Language Dialogues (seit 2018)
Information Needs in Natural Language Dialogues
As conversational search becomes more pervasive, it becomes increasingly important to understand the users' underlying needs when they converse with such systems in diverse contexts. The aim of this project is to improve information need detection. In the long term, this will help improving conversation between user and system, because the system gains a better understanding of what the user wants when it is able to detect the user’s information needs. For this purpose, we have chosen the food domain as area of interest.
Team:
- Alexander Frummet, M.Sc.
- PD Dr. David Elsweiler
Kontakt:
URoadworks (seit 2018)
URoadworks: Navigieren in dynamischen Umgebungen
In URroadworks wird die Skalierbarkeit des Datenmodells von URWalking und der Zeitaufwand, kurzfristig auch komplexe ?nderungen im Modell vorzunehmen, in einem realistischen Szenario evaluiert. In den kommenden Jahren wird der zentrale Teil des Campus der Universit?t Regensburg saniert. Die Bauma?nahmen führen zu st?ndig neuen Sperrungen bekannter Wege, gerade für Personen mit Handicap.?
Als Gegenma?nahme werden Personen an gesperrten Wegen durch Umleitungsschilder mit QR-Codes auf das Campus-Navigationssystem aufmerksam gemacht. Sobald eine Person einen QR-Code gescannt hat, ist ihre Position bekannt, und sie kann sich von URWalking zum Ziel führen lassen. Im Hintergrund werden regelm??ig die Navigationsdaten im Datenmodell von URWalking überprüft und aktualisiert, so dass die Navigationsanweisungen von URWalking immer aktuell sind.
Aus den Nutzungsdaten sollen sp?ter Theorien über das Informationsverhalten von Personen im ?ffentlichen Raum empirisch validiert werden: welche Informationsbedürfnisse entstehen durch die Baustelle? Welche Systemantworten sind warum in welcher Situation hilfreich? Wie verhalten sich Nutzer mit Ortskenntnis gegenüber den au?ergew?hnlichen Routenanweisungen - werden sie versuchen, eigene Abkürzungen zu finden? Wie verhalten sich Ortsunkundige?
Projektleiter: Prof. Dr. Bernd Ludwig
FoodChoice (seit 2017)
FoodChoice - Modelling & Changing Online Food Choices through Recommenders
Studying how people upload and browse online recipes has recently become an active field of research. While there is a growing body of work investigating which types of food are consumed and how this relates to real-world health related issues, such as e.g. diabetes or obesity, little research focus has yet been devoted to understanding how people make their food choices online, how they are influenced by certain contextual factors, how this behavior can be modelled or how this behavior can be changed. With respect to the last problem, recommender systems - such as those used by online stores to suggest products customers might like- are often touted as part of the solution. However, very little literature exists describing to which extent food preferences can be changed or the different effects different algorithmic approaches can have. In response we initiated a cross-border research project FoodChoice, which aims to not only to provide a better understanding regarding how certain factors, such as temporality, user geography and social relations between users influence the food choices people make online, but to moreover investigate how this behavior can be modelled and changed through novel health-aware recommender algorithms.
Team:
- PD Dr. David Elsweiler
- Dr. Christoph Trattner (University of Bergen)
- Prof. Dr. Bernd Ludwig
Information Behavior at Transitional Spaces (seit 2016)
Where to Go and What to Do: Towards Understanding Task-Based Information Behavior at Transitional Spaces
In public transitional spaces, such as airports, users are faced with diverse challenges regarding information interaction and use. These challenges arise due to the scheduled and/or location-dependent procedures users are required to perform. Understanding what these users need or desire in the context of such spaces, what information is on offer, both online and in situ, and how these aspects interrelate is important to facilitate the design of systems that are accepted by the users concerned. However, very little is known about human information behavior (HIB) in public transitional spaces. As a starting point to understand how behavior in such spaces relates to or differs from information behavior in other contexts, holistically, I will create an explanatory model of airport information behavior by conducting an exploratory grounded theory based field study and relating my findings to those of existing models.
(from: Melanie A. Kilian. 2019. Where to Go and What to Do: Towards Understanding Task-Based Information Behavior at Transitional Spaces. In 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’19), March 10–14, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland Uk. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298972)
Team:
Kontakt: Melanie A. Kilian, M.A.
Corroborate (seit 2016)
Corroborate: Understanding and supporting the information credibility judgments people make online
Making credibility judgements in information environments, such as the web is challenging because, in contrast to traditional print and broadcast media, often no quality control mechanism exists. This places increased emphasis on user information literacy skills, including their ability to evaluate information critically. These are skills, which people, regardless of education level, tend to overestimate (Gross 2012). Moreover, recent IR research has emphasized that user actions while seeking information, as well as the perception of information found is biased in countless ways. Although credibility judgements for web pages and SERP snippets have been well studied, we still know relatively little about how such evaluations are made and how they may be affected by user biases. This project aims to broaden our understanding of how people judge credibility, how successful they are, and what determines this. We further aim to design systems to support the critical evaluation of information informed by the improved better understanding the processes and biases involved.
Team:
- PD Dr. David Elsweiler
- Dr. David Losada (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)
- Dr. Markus Kattenbeck (Technische Universit?t Wien)
URWalking: Fu?g?ngernavigation mit Landmarken (seit 2011)
URWalking - Universit?t Regensburg Walking
Erinnern Sie sich, wann Sie zum letzten Mal nach dem Weg fragen mussten? Wurde Ihnen gesagt, dass Sie in 250m rechts abbiegen sollen? Vermutlich nicht, denn gew?hnlich werden Wegbeschreibungen mit Hilfe auff?lliger Objekte (Landmarken) kommuniziert.
Im Rahmen des UR-Walking-Projekts soll diese Kommunikationsform auch für mobile Navigationssysteme zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Gerade der verschlungene Campus der Universit?t Regensburg eignet sich zur Erprobung der Landmarkennavigation. Au?erdem findet das Themengebiet regen Anklang bei Studierenden im Rahmen von Seminaren
Vom bisher sehr erfolgreichen Verlauf des Projekts URWalking zeugen zwei Teilnahmen an der CeBIT.
Projektleiter: Prof. Dr. Bernd Ludwig
Projekte in der Vergangenheit
Online Food Culture (2018-2022)
Understanding food culture with digital traces
The aim of our project is to use the traces of human behavior with online recipes to explore the differences in food culture across the world. We are now focusing on the visual aspects of the images associated with recipes. Based on the Explicit Visual Features (EVF) and Deep Neural Network image embeddings (DNN), we plan to dig out how food culture distributed and the aesthetics of preferred recipe images within and across cultures. Techniques related to computer science, information science and data science would be employed in our project. We have done a couple of experiments on three datasets which sourced from three large recipe platforms from China, Germany and the United States, which shows that using visu