Bachelor's and master's students studying information systems (IS) at KIT can apply for an IS scholarship. The scholarship will start on October 1st, 2023 and will run for 12 months. Scholarship holders are supported with 300 Euros per month. The scholarship is awarded by the non-profit association "Die Wirtschaftsinformatik e.V." and serves to promote young people in the field of IS. The scholarship is funded by companies that provide the financial support and are involved in the awarding of the scholarship. For the 2023/24 period, three IS scholarships will be awarded by Schwarz IT KG at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Michael Gau successfully defended on May 4th 2023 his PhD thesis titled “Open Design Science Research Systems: Design Principles and System Instantiations“.

He convinced the examination committee Prof. Dr. Ali Sunyaev, Prof. Dr. Jan vom Brocke (University of Liechtenstein), Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche, and Prof. Dr. Orestis Terzidis with his research. We congratulate Michi Gau for his successful defense!

On April 27th 2023 12 schoolgirls were invited to get hands-on insights on information systems and human-computer interaction research at h-lab as part of the nationwide career and study orientation day for girls.  Together with members from the h-lab and KD2Lab representatives, the girls developed various prototypes leveraging the human-centered design process. They were asked to develop a prototypical app for problems from their everyday lives.  Topics were, for example, "Which advanced course at school should I choose?", "Which film fits our interests?"...

Prof. Maedche in cooperation with UIG e.V. has launched a new website describing and promoting the seal “Nutzerzentriert entwickelt”. The seal is offered for software-developing organizations that are successfully audited with regards to their user-centered development processes. The audits are performed by a group of usability and UX service providers tightly connected to UIG e.V. The goal of the seal is to support organizations in their transformation processes and showcase user-centricity as a differentiating characteristic. Further information is available here: https://nutzerzentriert-entwickelt.de/

The paper "AutoChemplete - Making Chemical Structural Formulas Accessible" has won the “Accessibility Challenges Judges’ Award” of the 20th International Web for All Conference. The Judges Award was selected by five judges coming from different backgrounds such as academia, industry, and government, all relating to accessibility.

The judges appreciated the problem-centeredness of the presented research project approach. Specifically, it was highlighted how systematically requirements elicitation and evaluation besides developing the tool has been performed. The paper is available in the W4A 2023 proceedings. We congratulate the winners!

The B.Sc. lecture ”Designing interactive Systems“ is targeted at master students who are interested in expanding their knowledge on designing successful human-computer interaction in business and society.  The aim of this course is to introduce advanced concepts and theories, interaction technologies as well as current practice of contemporary interactive systems. The course is complemented with a design capstone project. This year’s capstone project is jointly offered with EnBW AG and will focus on design challenges surrounding the broad question of “Where and how can generative AI language models, such as ChatGPT, be used at EnBW?”

The B.Sc. lecture “Foundations of Interactive Systems” is targeted at bachelor students who are interested in the design of successful human-computer interaction in business and private life. It introduces key concepts and principles of interactive systems from a human and computer perspective. It also describes core human-centered design processes for interactive systems and provides insights into the use & contexts of interactive systems in business and society. The course is complemented by a design capstone project, where students work in teams and apply design methods & techniques to create an interactive prototype for a given challenge.

Our IISM teams will be well represented at the 31st European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) in Kristiansand / Norway, taking place in June.  A total of 13 papers across the information systems research groups of Alexander Mädche, Gerhard Satzger, and Christof Weinhardt  have been accepted in a competitive environment. Congratulations to all the authors and fruitful discussions at the conference!

How can companies effectively build up competencies to successfully implement AI projects? As part of the investBW-funded project WeLearnAI in cooperation with respeak GmbH, innovative solutions for the interactive support of competence development are being developed and piloted.

We will kick-off the project in cooperation with Cyberforum on May 2nd at 5 PM at the KD2Lab. Further information is available here: https://www.cyberforum.de/veranstaltungen/thinkcenter-we-learn-ai-02-05-2023

More research on the “home office” phenomenon and resulting scientifically grounded knowledge is urgently required that helps practitioners to advance future arrangements of good (hybrid) working conditions. Even beyond COVID-19, many office employees will continue to work, at least partly, from home. Although the degree of virtualization will continue to increase, a combination of physical and virtual presence can be expected. Hybrid forms of working will become part of our future private and professional life.

 

In the upcoming summer semester 2023 we again offer the bachelor's lecture Foundations of Interactive Systems (FOIS) and the master's lecture Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) as electives.

Both lectures contain a practice-oriented capstone project in the field of generative AI language models: In the FOIS lecture, student teams apply the human-centered design process and design prototypical writing support systems using large language models. 

Conversational agents have become omnipresent in our daily life. We are surrounded by various conversational agents, from Siri and Alexa to Google Assistant and the recent ChatGPT. They therefore have also become an increasingly popular research topic in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Information Systems. For this special issue, we received a diverse set of submissions that showcase the latest advancements in the field of conversational agents. After a rigorous peer-review process, we are excited to present a selection of six thought-provoking and impactful papers. Further information is available here:  https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/41071