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News

[08.12.2023] Student Research Project Conference 2023

Last Friday, in a yearly highlight, the student research project conference was held. In this event, groups of students present their results from their year-long machine learning research projects. The topics ranged from time series, over computer vision to reinforcement learning.

[27.10.2023] ISMLL Research Retreat 2023

This years research retreat, held near the nice city of Göttingen was again dedicated to work in small groups, exploring paper ideas and arriving at the first experimental results to evaulate whether the idea is promising. The picture was taken during the hike which is a yearly tradition during our retreats.

[10.11.2022] Graduation Ceremony 2022

After a two-year gap due to COVID, we were able to host a graduation ceremony for our students. The graduated students were awarded degrees in-person.

[27.09.2022] ISMLL Research Retreat 2022

The topic of our retreat this year was to explore various research areas and investigate possible gaps in the current literature that can be worked upon. The topics included Active Learning and time-series forecasting. The 4-day retreat enabled us to start the literature review in these areas and start prototyping the models.

[26.10.2022] PhD. Defense Mohsan Jameel

Congratulations to Mohsan Jameel for successfully defending his PhD dissertation titled "Edge Machine Learning – Fast Model Averaging for Decentralized Model Training".

[21.09.2022] PhD. Defense Jonas Sonntag

Congratulations to Jonas Sonntag for successfully defending his PhD dissertation titled "Enabling Smart Parking Services with Machine Learning ".

[12.09.2022] Congrats to our students!

Congratulations to our masters students Christian Löwens, Inaam Ashraf, Alexander Gembus, Genesis Cuizon for publishing their findings from our yearly student research projects in a paper titled "Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem with Precedence Constraints by Deep Reinforcement Learning" (paper) at the 45th German conference on Artificial Intelligence! Abstract: This work presents solutions to the Traveling Salesperson Problem with precedence constraints (TSPPC) using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) by adapting recent approaches that work well for regular TSPs. Common to these approaches is the use of graph models based on multi-head attention layers. One idea for solving the pickup and delivery problem (PDP) is using heterogeneous attentions to embed the different possible roles each node can take. In this work, we generalize this concept of heterogeneous attentions to the TSPPC. Furthermore, we adapt recent ideas to sparsify attentions for better scalability. Overall, we contribute to the research community through the application and evaluation of recent DRL methods in solving the TSPPC. Our code is available (here)

[23.05.2022 - 12.06.2022] "STADTRADELN"

CITY CYCLING is a competition that involves completing as many daily journeys as possible in an environmentally-friendly manner using your bike over a 21-day period. Whether you ride every day or cycled only rarely until now. Every kilometer counts – and even more so if you would have completed the journey by car otherwise. Last year, the "University of Hildesheim" team was able to take 1st place in the category "Team with the most participants" and 2nd place in the category "Team with the absolute cycling kilometers" at the district level. This competition aims to help people be more active, lower their carbon footprint, and encourage a more bike-friendly city infrastructure. This year Data Analytics would like to participate as a sub-team under the university of Hildesheim team. At the end of the 21 days, the aggregated kilometers completed by the sub-team would show our contribution to the challenge.

[05.05.2022] Koex Project: Kick-off

Our BMBF-Project "Kollaboratives Machine Learning zur Erkennung von Fraud und Risiken in ERP-Systemen (KOEX)" had our first successful kick-off meeting with our Partners Hochschule Karlsruhe, prenode GmbH and Sivis in Karlsruhe!

[27.10.2021] ISMLL Research Retreat 2021

The topic of our retreat this year was to explore various research areas and investigate possible gaps in the current literature that can be worked upon. The topics included Debiasing Neural Networks, Vehicle Routing problems and time-series forecasting. The 4-day retreat enabled us to start the literature review in these areas and start prototyping the models.

[30.09.2021] Congrats to our students!

Congratulations to our masters students Ahmad Bdeir, Simon Boeder, Tim Dernedde and Kirill Tkachuk for publishing their findings from our yearly student research projects in a paper titled "RP-DQN: An Application of Q-Learning to Vehicle Routing Problems" (paper) at the 44th German conference on Artificial Intelligence! Abstract: In this paper we present a new approach to tackle complex routing problems with an improved state representation that utilizes the model complexity better than previous methods. We enable this by training from temporal differences. Specifically Q-Learning is employed. We show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for autoregressive policies that sequentially insert nodes to construct solutions on the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). Additionally, we are the first to tackle the Multiple Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) and demonstrate that this problem type greatly benefits from our approach over other Machine Learning (ML) methods.

[23.06.2021 : 13.30-15.00] "Be a Digital Accelerator - coming from Data Analytics"

During the Berufseinstiegswoche, our very own Alexander Busch will be talking about his entry into the full-time career life after graduating from our program. He is currently working at Hannover RE SE Insurance as a Data Scientist. He will be sharing experience and responsibilities at a reinsurance company. The session will be conducted online and requires prior registration, please click here to sign up.

[03.12.2020] "Student Research Project Conference 2020 (SRPCONF2020)"

Every year our students take part in a year-long research-driven project. This project aims to enable the students to tackle a machine learning problem and design their solution as guided by the state of the art methods being employed in research. After this project, they present their work to their peers and showcase the learning outcomes of their hard work. This year we will be having our SRPCONF2020 online. The schedule for this can be found here. A brief description of the projects can be found here

[23.03.2020] "Congratulations Riccardo Lucato"

Our student Riccardo Lucato and his co authors Jonas Falkner and Lars Schmidt-Thieme have had their paper titled "An Efficient Evolutionary Solution to the joint Order Batching - Order Picking Planning Problem" accepted in " GECCO-2020, Track: Evolutionary Combinatorial Optimization and Metaheuristics - Genetic Algorithms"

Abstract:

In the economic cycle of a company, warehouse management is known to be one of the most labor-intensive and costly activities. In fact, nearly all the operations performed in a typical warehouse are to some extent related to order picking, the class of actions aimed at fetching items from their storage locations. This is a burdensome procedure that significantly impacts the sale price of the merchandise. Procedural efficiency can only be attained by solving various combinatorial problems, amidst which particular prominence is assumed by the Order Batching Problem (OBP) and the Order Picking Planning Problem (OPP). Previous research in the field has either focused on solving the two problems separately or proposed two-stages optimization algorithms. Failing to consolidate the two components, both approaches are bound to return sub-optimal solutions. The present work amends such gap in the State of the Art by proposing an innovative Genetic Algorithm for Joint Optimization (GAJO), which optimizes the integrated Order Batching - Order Picking Planning Problem. Through a case study performed on one of the warehouses of a well-known German retail company, the proposed GAJO is shown to be both more effective and considerably faster than the baseline models.

[12.07.2019] "Program Director's Garden Party"

12th of July 2019 at 6 pm Center for World Music, Timotheuskirche

Program:

With the summer of 2018, the Pioneering batch of Masters in Data Analytics saw it's first graduates complete their studies and head off into industry and academia. On the 12th of July 2019, ISMLL hosted their first and annual "Program Director's Garden party. The event was held in order to meet and greet the homecoming alumni and to confer on them their certificates and graduation caps. Pictures of this event will be shared shortly.

[18.06.2019] “Data Science – From Lab to Factory”, a talk by Dr. Uwe Bretschneider (Data Engineer at Volkswagen Financial Services)

Dr. Uwe Bretschneider will be giving his talk on Tuesday, 18th of June 2019 at 6 pm (room B 26 Samelson Campus)

Abstract:

In the past years, promising academic results were achieved in the field of data science. Supported by technological progress and methodological advancement, companies realize the potential and benefits that can result from applying machine learning approaches on their data to drive business-decisions. However, while projects successfully reach a proof-of-concept stage in a lab environment, the transformation to a software or data product that creates value is challenging. At Volkswagen Financial Services AG, several obstacles were identified, especially the missing technological foundations to operationalize machine learning models. The goal of the presentation is to provide an overview of technological and organizational challenges related to the transformation process of machine learning models from a lab environment to production-grade software. In a second step, a prototype based on Python is developed to operationalize a machine learning model in a REST-based endpoint.

[12.03.2019] 2nd PhD Defense of Nicolas Schilling
Nicolas Schilling will defend his thesis on "Bayesian Hyperparameter Optimization - Relational and Scalable Surrogate Models for Hyperparameter Optimization Across Problem Instances". The defence will take place on Tuesday. 12.03.2019 in room B 26 (SPL)

[11.03.2019] " Towards Automated Deep Learning", a talk by Prof. Frank Hutter (University of Freiburg)

Prof. Dr. Frank Hutter will be giving his talk on Monday, 11th of March 2019 from 6 pm - 8 pm (room B 26)

Abstract:

The performance of deep neural networks heavily depends on the chosen network architectures and their hyperparameters. In this talk, I will discuss methods for effective optimization in this combined space, thereby paving the way to fully automated end-to-end deep learning. Next, to several competition-winning AutoML systems, I will discuss BOHB, a robust and efficient multi-fidelity hyperparameter optimization system that is parallelizable and applicable to tuning a wide range of methods, including AutoML systems, convolutional neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, and deep reinforcement learning. I will also discuss a novel approach for learning to design RNA using deep reinforcement learning (RL), in which we used BOHB to jointly tune the RL agent's state representation, its policy network's architecture, and its hyperparameters, yielding a clear new state-of-the-art in RNA design.

[07.12.2018] 2nd Annual Student Research Project Conference
ISMLL hosted the 2nd Annual SRP Conference to showcase the projects undertaken by the students as part of their degree. The aim of the SRP is to give the students hands-on experience with conducting a research-driven project from the ground up. The students presented their work in areas including automated driving, computer vision, and healthcare.

[19.01.2018] PhD Defense of Martin Wistuba
Martin Wistuba defended his thesis on "Automated Machine Learning, Bayesian Optimization, Meta-Learning & Applications". The whole ISMLL team and its leader Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme congratulate and say cheers!

[13.12.2017] Final Presentations: Student Research Projects 2017
Final Presentations for Student Research Projects year 2017 will take place on Wednesday 13 Dec 2017 14:00 - 17:25 at L 131 (Aula Bühler-Campus, Lübecker Straße 1, Hildesheim). [ detailed schedule ].


[30.11.2017] PhD Studentship and Postdoctoral Position available
Applications are invited for a full-time PhD and for a post-doctoral research position at the Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab (ISMLL), Computer Science Department, University of Hildesheim, Germany. The position is available to be filled immediately and offers tenures of three years. The salary amounts to TV-L E13 (roughly 40.000 EUR per year). [more]

[1-11-2012] ÜberDax Started The progressive digitalization of economy and society is making more and more processes observable and thus open to partial automation or at least decision support through machine learning models: in Industry 4.0 machine data can be used used to detect problems early and avoid failures or to reduce manufacturing variances and make planning more robust, in autonomous driving cars sensor and video data is already in use for simple maneuvers such as parking and will soon also be used for driving on highways, in the area of ​​e-health they help in segmenting organs and tumors or predicting how a tumor will most likely develop. [more]
Contact: Lars Schmidt-Thieme,Lydia Voß

[18.05.2017] Summer inter 2017 (DAAD-WISE)
Mr. Dripta Roychaudhuri joined ISMLL as an intern student from India under DAAD-WISE Scholarship.

[18.01.2017] PhD position position available
Applications are invited for a full-time PhD research position at the Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab (ISMLL), Computer Science Department, University of Hildesheim, Germany. The position is available to be filled immediately and offers tenures of three years. The salary amounts to TV-L E13 (roughly 40.000 EUR per year).

[09.2016] ISMLL wins ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge
The ISMLL team consisting of Martin Wistuba, Nghia Duong-Trung and Nicolas Schilling has won the bank branch visit prediction task in this year's ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge! The task was to predict for roughly 350 Hungarian banks how often a user will visit them for a new year, given the data of the old year. To do so, a log of transactions of the past year was given as well as other features of the customers, such as the place where they live and their wealthiness. The three main pillars of success were "a strong ensemble model such as xgboost, a smart feature engineering and an intense hyperparameter search" according to Wistuba. The whole ISMLL team proudly congratulates!!

[28.06.2017] Visit to the City Hall, Hildesheim
The students of Master program Data Analytics were invited by Hildesheim’s mayor Dr. Ingo Meyer to the City Hall.

[08.03.2016] Best paper award for ISMLL's internship student Mit Shah
Our internship student of last year has won the best paper award at the ACM IKDD Conference on Data Science, 2016, with his paper on "Learning DTW-Shapelets for Time-Series Classification". Congratulations, Mit!

[14.01.2016] PhD Defense of Josif Grabocka
Today, Josif Grabocka successfully defendes his doctoral thesis on the topic of "Invariant Features for Time Series Classification". The whole ISMLL team and its leader Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme congratulate and say cheers!

[01.09.2015] Summer School Robotics 2015
As it has become a yearly tradition, ISMLL also provided a course "Robotics" for the computer summer school 2015 of the university of Hildesheim for children with ages ranging from 12 to 15. The course instructors Kristin Kutzner and Nicolas Schmidt gave an introduction to robotics by explaining simple robots and their programming at the example of Lego Mindstorm robots. Furthermore, the participants created several own robots to execute tasks like navigating through a labyrinth and removing barriers.

[25.02.2015] REDUCTION awarded excellent!
The ISMLL-coordinated FP7 project Reduction has successfully completed. The project innovated and tested groundbreaking methodologies in terms of Ecological Routing, Driving Behavior Adaptation, Multimodal Routing and V2X communications. Therefore, the European Commission officially assessed that REDUCTION achieved an "Excellent progress" by fully accomplishing its objectives and exceeding the expectations.

[29.10.2014] Final Review of the REDUCTION Project
The Reduction project successfully held its final review meeting in Aalborg, Denmark, on October 29, 2014. The achievements of the project in the areas of ecological routing and ecological driver behavior adaptation are highly qualitative. University of Hildesheim coordinated a multinational consortium of 9 institutions from 5 countries, and furthermore contributed scientifically in analysis eco-driving behaviors for trains.

[07.07.2014] Newspaper article in Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung about ISMLL's research
In the newspaper of Thursday, 21st of August an article about the research conducted at ISMLL can be found. The article details on the research of our recently graduated colleague Rasoul Karimi . For more Information find the article as PDF Scan here.

[07.07.2014] ISMLL organised the Workshop on Feedback from Multimodal Interactions in Learning Management Systems at the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining
At July 4 the Workshop on Feedback from Multimodal Interactions in Learning Management Systems (FFMI@EDM 2014) took place at the 7th International Conference on Educational Data Mining in London. The workshop was organised by ISMLL for the project iTalk2Learn. The iTalk2Learn project was represented in this workshop by 2 different talks about emotion and affect recognition in intelligent tutoring systems. Overall, the workshop was a full success with about 25 participants and very interesting and fruitful discussions about Multimodal Interactions in Learning Management Systems.

[02.05.2014] Lucas Drumond: Lucas Drumond successfully defended his PhD thesis "Factorization Models for Multi-Relational Data" on Monday, March 31 with honors. His supervisor Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme, and the ISMLL team congratulate and wish all the best for his future career.

[13-05-2014] Oberseminar talk: Moritz Gutowski (BSc WI) talks about Evaluierung von Algorithmen und Techniken zum Spielen und Lösen von Dots and Boxes
Abstract:
Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, unterschiedliche Algorithmen und Techniken vorzustellen und zu vergleichen, die verwendet werden, um das Papier-und-Stift-Spiel Dots and Boxes (dt. Käsekästchen) zu lösen oder erfolgreich zu spielen.
In diesem First-Idea-Talk wird das Spiel vorgestellt und in der kombinatorischen Spieltheorie eingeordnet. Es folgt eine Vorstellung der für Dots and Boxes spezifischen Techniken, wie Ketten und Symmetrie. Abschließend folgt eine erste Übersicht und Vorstellung der in der Arbeit zu evaluierenden Algorithmen z.B. Retrograde Analyse oder die Minimax-Algorithmus-Varianten Negamax und Alpha-Beta-Suche.
[more]

[24-04-2014] Invited talk:
Prof. Dr. Ulf Brefeld of the Knowledge Mining and Assessment Group of TU Darmstadt talks about Summarising Related Sentences
Abstract:
We cast multi-sentence compression as a structured prediction task. Related sentences are represented by a word graph and every path in the graph is a (more or less meaningful) summary of the collection. We propose to adapt shortest path algorithms to the data at hand so that the shortest path realises the best possible summary of a collection of related sentences. We report on empirical results and compare our approach to state-of-the-art baselines using word graphs.
Time and place:
24.04.14, 12:00-14:00, room B26, Samelsonplatz.
[more]

[02.04.2014] Rasoul Karimi: Rasoul Karimi successfully defended his PhD thesis "Active Learning for Recommender Systems" on Friday, March 21 with honors. His supervisor Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme, and the ISMLL team congratulate and wish all the best for his future career.

[02.04.2014] Dr. Andre Busche: Andre Busche successfully defended his PhD thesis "Techniques for Real World Ground Penetrating Radar Data Analysis" on Friday, December 13 with honors. His supervisor Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme, and the ISMLL team congratulate and wish all the best for his future career.

[31-03-2014] DISPUTATION: The disputation of Mr. Lucas Rego Drumond for Dr. rer. nat. with the dissertation "Factorization Models for Multi-Relational Data" takes place 14:00 in room B 26 at Samelsonplatz.

[25-03-2014] Oberseminar Talks:
Lars Künnemann (MSc IMIT) speaks about Hyperparameter Optimierung mit Hilfe von Gauss Prozessen
Jan Stapel (BSc IMIT) speaks about Mining Pattern Bitmaps for Time Series Anomaly Detection
[more]

[21-03-2014] DISPUTATION: The disputation of Mr. Rasoul Karimi, M. Sc. for Dr. rer. nat. with the dissertation "Active Learning for Recommender Systems" takes place 10:00 in room B 26 at Samelsonplatz.

[12-03-2014] News paper article about ISMLL projects: In the Hildesheimer Allgemeinen Zeitung was an article about Reduction and iTalk2Learn.
[more]

[11-03-2014] Oberseminar Talk: Michael Kessler (MSc IMIT) speaks about An Empirical Survey of Image Feature Representations for Embedded Traffic Sign Recognition
[more]

[10-03-2014] CeBIT: ISMLL is at CeBIT with the projects Reduction and iTalk2Learn. Please visit us in Hall 9 at booth C28.

[18-02-2014] Oberseminar Talk: Rodion Marx (MSc IMIT) speaks about Personalisiertes Empfehlungssystem für Fahrzeugkonfiguratoren unter Verwendung eines Faktorisierungsmodells
[more]

[28-01-2014] Oberseminar Talk: Christoph Herrmann (BSc WI) speaks about Evaluierung von Heuristiken angewandt in der Bidirectional BFIDA*-Suche für Peg Solitaire
Abstract:
Der Vortrag behandelt die Untersuchung der Effizienzen verschiedener Heuristiken angewandt auf das Brettspiel Peg Solitaire. Die Ergebnisse liefert dabei der Suchalgorthmus Bidirectional BFIDA*. Es wird zuerst kurz erläutert, wie sich die drei Einzelteile des Algorithmus (Breitensuche, IDA*, Bidirektionale Suche) zusammensetzen lassen. Anschließend wird auf das Brettspiel Peg Solitaire eingegangen, um kurz das Spiel und alle suchrelevanten Eigenschaften aufzuzeigen. Im Anschluss wird die Anwendung der Bidirektionalen BFIDA*-Suche auf Peg Solitaire beschrieben. Es folgen die durchgeführten Experimente und deren Auswertung für drei verschieden Formen des Spielbrettes. Abgeschlossen wird der Vortrag mit einem Fazit und Ausblick.
[more]

[17-09-2013] Oberseminar Talk: Jan Stapel (BSc IMIT) speaks about Mining Pattern Bitmaps for Time Series Anomaly Detection
Abstract:
Wherever a natural or technological process needs to be observed, sensors are applied to submit real valued measurements which are indicating its status at a certain time. Many such recordings, denoted as time-series, contain abnormal patterns. However, since a domain expert is an expensive resource, automatic approaches are needed to find anomalies in those time series. The aim of this thesis is to review two comparable algorithms for anomaly detection in time series. This include the implementation and evaluation of the both methods. In this talk the first results of the thesis will be presented.
[more]

[10-09-2013] Oberseminar Talk: Martin Wistuba (ISMLL, Uni Hildesheim) speaks about Move Prediction in Go - Modeling Feature Interactions Using Latent Factors
Abstract:
Move prediction systems have always been part of strong Go programs. Recent research has revealed that taking interactions between features into account improves the performance of move predictions. In this paper, a factorization model is applied and a supervised learning algorithm, Latent Factor Ranking (LFR), which enables to consider these interactions, is introduced. Its superiority will be demonstrated in comparison to other state-of-the-art Go move predictors. LFR improves accuracy by 3% over current state-of-the-art Go move predictors on average and by 5% in the middle- and endgame of a game. Depending on the dimensionality of the shared, latent factor vector, an overall accuracy of over 41% is achieved.
[more]

[04-09-2013] An unusual research result: After the publication of a paper nobody expects that the results finally can be seen in a promotion film. But exactly this happened to Martin Wistuba and Lars Schäfers. The paper about the comparison of different move predictors for the Asian boardgame Go arouse the interest of the group playmorego which has the target to make Go more popular in the Western world. Therefore, a promotion film was created which uses the formulas of the paper which can be recognized if you carefully look at the blackboard.

[13-08-2013] Oberseminar Talks:
Johann Witkowski (Bachelor thesis) speaks about Continuous Integration und Unit-Tests für Empfehlungssysteme
Abstract:
Die Continuous Integration Praxis findet in der Softwareentwicklung Verwendung und wird dafür eingesetzt die Qualität der zu entwickelnden Software zu erhöhen. Bestimmte Leitsätze dieser Praxis, vereint mit einem Continuous Integration Server verhindern gezielt viele Probleme, die bei der klassischen Softwareentwicklung entstehen können. Dabei werden unter anderem automatisch Tests durchgeführt, die die Software auf ihr Soll-Verhalten prüfen sollen. Dieses Konzept wurde auf die Entwicklung von Empfehlungssystemen erweitert, indem automatisiert Machine Learning Experimente durchgeführt wurden. Dabei muss über die enstehenden Probleme diskutiert werden, da die Eigenschaften der Experimente den Leitsätzen der Continuous Integration Praxis widersprechen.

Lars Künnemann (Master thesis) speaks about Hyperparameter Optimierung mit Hilfe von Gauss Prozessen
Abstract:
Viele Machine Learning Methoden müssen mit Hyperparametern konfiguriert werden, um brauchbare Ergebnisse zu erzielen. Diese Hyperparametersuche übernehmen in der Regel Experten auf dem jeweiligen Fachgebiet oder lässt sich mit Brute-Force-Verfahren (Grid Suche) bestimmen, die allerdings eine sehr lange Zeit zur Bestimmung der besten Hyperparameterkombination benötigen, insbesondere wenn die Anzahl der Hyperparameter hoch ist.
Das Ziel dieser Masterarbeit wird es sein, mit Hilfe des sog. Gaussian Process die Hyperparametersuche effizienter zu gestalten im Vergleich zu einem Brute-Force-Verfahren. Durch einen Gaussian Process wird der nächste zu testende Wert des gesuchten Hyperparameters bestimmt, der wahrscheinlich zu einem besserem Ergebnis führen wird. Der Vortrag beinhaltet die ersten Ansätze und Versuche das genannte Ziel zu erreichen.
[more]

[02-08-2013] Computer summer school 2013: As every year the ISMLL provided also this year a course "Robotics" for the computer summer school 2013 of the university of Hildesheim for children from 12 to 15. The course instructors Ruth Janning and Patrick Jähne gave an introduction to robotics by explaining simple robots and their programming. Furthermore, the participants created several own robots to execute tasks like playing soccer or navigating through a labyrinth and removing barriers.

[06-07-2013] Fachbereichs4-Preis: Dr. Zeno Gantner got the Fachbereichs4-Preis of the department of Mathematics, Natural Science, Economics and Computer Science of the University of Hildesheim for the best doctoral thesis in 2012. The thesis supervised by Prof. Dr.Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme is concerned with "Supervised Machine Learning Methods for Item Recommendation".
Christian Brauch got the Fachbereichs4-Preis for the best master thesis in 2012. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr.Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme and Lucas Drumond and treats "Recommender System for Cars".
The ISMLL congratulates!


[25-06-2013] Oberseminar Talk: Michael Kessler (Master project IMIT) speaks about Classifier comparison for optical character recognition on road signs
Abstract:
The image-based recognition of road signs is an important research area in the Robert Bosch GmbH. Within this project thesis, different classification methods for the detection of road signs, particularly of supplementary road signs (additional panels) were analyzed, evaluated and compared with each other. Additional panels appear as supplements to threat-, right of way-, prohibition-, mandatory-, information-, and directional- signs and show text (characters) and pictograms (lorries, trailers, cars, arrows, etc.). The Bosch-internal traffic sign database contains 4547 labeled images of additional panels, together with the location information of all depicted characters/pictograms. The classifier comparison has been done using freely available implementations of Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Also different image pre-processing methods such as contrast normalization, thresholding and virtual training data were applied and evaluated.
[more]

[16-06-2013] Wien: Dr. Christoph Freudenthaler got for his doctoral thesis the award Anerkennungspreis der Österreichischen Statistischen Gesellschaft. The thesis supervised by Prof. Dr.Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme is concerned with matrix- und tensor factorisation models and their expansion and adaption to recommender systems.
The ISMLL congratulates!


[18-06-2013] Oberseminar Talk: Neelava Sengupta (ISMLL, Uni Hildesheim) speaks about Research and overview of project iTalk2Learn-'Talk, Tutor, Explore, Learn: Intelligent Tutoring and Exploration for Robust Learning'
Abstract:
iTalk2Learn is an EU project and is part of 7th framework program. During a three year working period a platform will be developed that will teach young learners (5-11 years) mathematics. The utilized technology is really innovative and will be able to recognize which is the best exercise for that particular student. Moreover, it allows to create more intuitive interfaces based on speech interacting. The use of natural language, instead of Keyboard and Mouse, will be helpful to young children, who are not already familiar with the written form. The presentation will give a short overview of the project along with the scientific work done and planned in the current stage.
[more]

[1-12-2012] iTalk2Learn Started iTalk2Learn wants to develop a platform for intelligent support that combines structured learning with exploratory learning activities. To do so cognitive models are applied, that represent the learning behavior of students in elementary education. The platform will enable learners to communicate and interact more naturally via state of the art touch and speech interfaces.
[more]

Contact: Neelava Sengupta, Carlotta Schatten, Lars Schmidt-Thieme

[1-10-2012] REMIX Completed Successfully REMIX (RFID-Enhanced Museum for Interactive Experience) project was successfully finished at September 2012. REMIX aims to provide personalized recommendations to visitors of museums. It exploits RFID technology to collect visitors’ interests non-intrusively while they are visiting exhibits in museums.
So far two articles about REMIX have been published: More Information

[1-09-2012] GfKL 2012 successfully organized by ISMLL: The University of Hildesheim together with the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg hosted in August 2012 the 36th Annual Conference (GfKl 2012) of the German Classification Society - Gesellschaft für Klassifikation (GfKl). The GfKl 2012 focused on advances in data analysis, statistics, knowledge discovery and machine learning. Problems from data analysis in marketing, finance, biostatistics, bioinformatics and interdisciplinary domains were considered. With participants from 20 countries from all over the world and more than 130 talks at 3 days the GfKl 2012 in Hildesheim was a complete success. Further information about the GfKl 2012 is available at the conference web page GfKL 2012.

Dr. Artus Krohn-Grimberghe Dr. Artus Krohn-Grimberghe has successfully completed his PhD studies with a very good defense of his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Analysis and Evaluation of Multi-Relational Recommender Systems". In his new position, he has joined University of Paderborn as Assistant Professor.
We wish him best of luck for his future endeavours.

Dr. Christoph Freudenthaler Dr. Christoph Freudenthaler has successfully completed his PhD studies with a very good defense of his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Generalizing Factorization Models from a Machine Learning Perspective with Applications to Recommender Systems". Christoph Freudenthaler worked on improving factorization models like Singular Value Decomposition with respect to predictive accuracy and applicability to large-scale data like purchase activities of thousands of customers in e-Commerce systems. Christoph contributed with his work to international and national research projects MyMedia and multi-relational factorization models. He also participated in the acquisition of the recently started EU-funded research project iTalk2Learn which is about enhancing electronic tutoring systems with artificial intelligence. In his new position at the University of Konstanz Christoph is continuing his research and works on improving predictive analytics techniques.
We wish him best of luck for his future endeavours.

Dr. Zeno Gantner Dr. Zeno Gantner has successfully completed his PhD studies with an excellent defense of his PhD thesis. The title of his thesis was "Supervised Machine Learning Methods for Item Recommendation". During his stay at ISMLL, he was leading the work package "Recommender Algorithm Development" in the MyMedia project. He investigated how to use and adapt machine learning algorithms in order to make accurate and fast recommendations. In practice, this helps to improve recommender systems for diverse applications areas like online shops, video streaming, music, movies, restaurants etc. Dr. Gantner has now joined Nokia to work as a Software Engineer and Data Analysis Specialist on maps search and places recommendation. We wish him best of luck for his future endeavours.


Research Retreat 2012 ISMLL organized Research Retreat Meeting 2012, from 10th Oct - 12th Oct 2012, at Huldersun Guest-house in Einbeck, Germany. The topic of this years meeting was, Parallel Machine Learning Algorithms for Big Data Analytics. Participents used different parallelization techniques like Hadoop/MapReduce and OpenMP to design and implement parallel versions of Stochastic Gradient Descent, Stochastic Newton's Algorithm, distributed Cascade SVM and Matrix Factorization.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme will have a tutorial in the KDD conference Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme jointly with Prof. Dr. Steffen Rendle, will have a tutorial in the KDD-2012 conference. The title of the tutorial is "Factorization Models for Recommender Systems and Other Applications". Further information is available here

MyMedia Dynamic Personalization and Recommendation Framework MyMediaLite Recommender System Algorithm Library MyMediaLite is a lightweight, multi-purpose library of recommender system algorithms. It addresses the two most common scenarios in collaborative filtering: rating prediction (e.g. on a scale of 1 to 5 stars) and item prediction from implicit feedback (e.g. from clicks or purchase actions). It is free/open source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Prof. Dr. Alexandros Nanopoulos moves to the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt:
Prof. Dr. Alexandros Nanopoulos will leave the ISMLL at the end of April for his new position at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. There, he will continue his excellent research and teaching activities at the economic and business science faculty. We thank Prof. Nanopoulos for 7 outstanding semesters at our department and wish him and his family all the best for the next stage in their lives.

Dr. Thai-Nghe Nguyen: Thai-Nghe Nguyen has successfully completed his PhD studies with a very good defense of his PhD thesis. The title of his talk as well as of his thesis was "Predicting Student Performance in an Intelligent Tutoring System". His supervisors Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme, Dr. Tomáš Horváth and the ISMLL team congratulate and wish Nghe all the best for his future career and life back home in Vietnam.

ISMLL at CeBIT 2012: You are welcome to visit our booth at Halle 9 C50. We plan to demonstrate the REMIX project there.

ISMLL organizes GfKL 2012: The University of Hildesheim together with the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg hosts in August 2012 the 36th Annual Conference (GfKl 2012) of the German Classification Society - Gesellschaft für Klassifikation (GfKl). The GfKl 2012 focuses on advances in data analysis, statistics, knowledge discovery and machine learning. Problems from data analysis in marketing, finance, bistatistics, bioinformatics and interdisciplinary domains are considered. The GfKl 2012 is an event with strong international attendance. With the conference program high synergistic effects shall be reached by theoretically as well as use-oriented contributions. Another important goal of the GfKl is to motivate young researchers to work in the field of data analysis, statistics, knowledge discovery and machine learning. Further information is available here .

Dr. Krisztian Buza: Krisztian Buza successfully defended his PhD thesis "Fusion Methods for Time Series Classification" on Monday, August 29 with honors. His supervisors Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme, Prof. Dr. Alexandros Nanopoulos and the ISMLL team congratulate and wish all the best for his new position as fellow researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Technical Informatics at the Technical University of Budapest.

Travel grant for SIGIR 2011 in Peking.: Christoph Freudenthaler, co-author with Prof. Dr. Steffen Rendle, Zeno Gantner and Prof. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme was awarded a travel grant for SIGIR 2011 from the correspondent organisation for their paper Fast Context-aware Recommendations with Factorization Machines.

Student Travel Grant Award at IJCNN 2011 Conference in San Jose, California, USA: Thai-Nghe Nguyen, co-author with Zeno Gantner, was awarded from the International Neural Network Society for their paper A New Evaluation Measure for Learning from Imbalanced Data.

The AcoGPR project starts in June 2011: The EFRE-funded project AcoGPR - Adaptive Contactless Ground Penetrating Radar - starts in June 2011. Along its opening, two student assistant positions are opened and expected to be filled for the whole project duration (2 years).

ISMLL offers new PhD position and Postdoc position.
Applications are invited for a full-time PhD and post-doctoral research position at the Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab (ISMLL), Computer Science Department, University of Hildesheim, Germany. Both positions are available to be filled immediately and offer tenures of three years. The salary amounts to German TV-L E13/E14, which is roughly 40.000 to 50.000 Euro gross income per year.

Best Student Paper Award at International Conference on Computer Supported Education 2011 (CSEDU 2011)
The ISMLL researches in Adaptive Tutoring Systems, especially Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning since a couple of years. At the International Conference on Computer Supported Education 2011 (CSEDU 2011) the team of ISMLL won the best-student-paper-award for the paper entitled "Matrix and Tensor Factorization for Predicting Student Performance". Thai-Nghe Nguyen and Lucas Drumond, who are the first and second authors, are PhD students under supervision of Dr. Tomáš Horváth and Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme.

New lecture Advanced topics in Machine Learning in summer 2011: The ISMLL is pleased to announce the new lecture Advanced topics in Machine Learning for summer 2011. The lecture will follow recent research topics in machine learning from the last years. Basic knowledge from the Machine Learning lecture is advisable, but not required.

No lecture 'Semantic Web' in summer 2011 Congratulations to Steffen Rendle for his juniorprofessorship at the University of Konstanz! Sadly, his previously announced lecture "Semantic Web" cannot be held by him for obvious reasons. We apologize for this.

CeBIT: Visit by the science minister: Among the many visitors at our CeBIT booth, Lower Saxony's minister of science and culture, Mrs. Johanna Wanka, informed herself about the activities of our lab in the area of multimedia recommender systems. Mrs. Wanka was quite impressed by the results of the EU project MyMedia. A mathematician by training, she was particulary interested in the statistical learning methods for recommender systems that we develop at the University of Hildesheim's Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab (ISMLL).

ISMLL at CeBIT- free tickets: The University of Hildesheim will be present at this year's CeBIT in Hannover with two booths, among them one organized by our lab. CeBIT is one of the world's largest computer and communications trade shows, and will take place between 1 to 5 of March. MyMedia – Dynamic Personalization of Multimedia – develops recommender systems for multimedia applications like Internet-based television (IPTV), web-based video and radio as well as online stores. Recommender systems suggest new and interesting content to the users, based on their past behavior. Those suggestions are individually suited to the interests of the respective users. The Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab (ISMLL) headed by Lars Schmidt-Thieme co-operates in MyMedia with six partner institutions from four different European countries.
If you want to visit us at CeBIT, send an e-mail to cebit@ismll.de for free tickets. You can find us in hall H 9 at booth B 24.

DFG project on Multirelational Factorization Models granted
A project proposal about Multirelational Factorization Models at the Information Systems and Machine Learning Lab (ISMLL) of Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme at University of Hildesheim has been granted by the German Research Council (DFG). [more]
The project will run for three years from 2011 - 2014. More information will be available here as the project proceeds.

Best Paper Award at Computational Science and Engineering
The ISMLL researches in time series classification since a couple of years. At the international conference on Computational Science and Engineering the team of Prof. Lars Schmidt-Thieme was able to win the best-paper-award for its outstanding paper entitled "Time-Series Classification based on Individualised Error Prediction". Krisztian Buza, who is the first author of the paper says: "I am proud that our work arouse the interest within an broader community of computer scientists. I studiedt the classification of time series during my my visiting semester at the University of Karlsruhe. Back home at the TU Budapest I deepend my knowledge within further lectures. From the very first moment I was fascinated by the problem which is why I started researching it as a PhD candidate at the University of Hildesheim.

ISMLL team wins awards at movie recommendation challenge: ISMLL members Zeno Gantner and Steffen Rendle, supervised by Lars Schmidt-Thieme, received two awards at the Context-aware Movie Recommendation Challenge (CAMRa), which was held at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in Barcelona. Goal of the challenge was to recommend individual movies for visitors of the moviepilot.de website in a certain period, e.g. the Christmas week. In the 'Live Evaluation' track, the quality of the recommendations was judged by moviepilot.de users after watching the movies. This is in contrast to the usual evaluation in such challenges, which is often based on simulated users and records of past user behavior.

MyMedia Project at IBC in Amsterdam: The ISMLL and the MyMedia project partners present the project's research result at this year's International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, one of the leading trade shows in the broadcasting sector.

Excellent: Christine Preisach successfully defended her doctoral thesis "Relational Semi-supervised Classification Using Multiple Relations" last Thursday, August 19 with honors. Her supervisors Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho, Prof. Dr. Dr. Lars Schmidt-Thieme and the ISMLL team congratulate and wish all the best for her new job as Advanced Analytics Expert at SAP.

Lecture "Spatial Analysis" also in winter term 2010/11: The lecture Spatial Analysis will be read next winter term 2010/2011. The time and place of this lecture will be announced soon.

Best Paper Award at WWW2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina: Steffen Rendle and Christoph Freudenthaler gained for their paper Factorizing Personalized Markov Chains for Next-Basket Recommendation the Best Paper Award at the 19th World-Wide-Web Conference (WWW 2010) in Raleigh, North Carolina.
ISMLL is involved in several research projects for Recommender Systems: MyMedia und LEFOS.

Student Travel Grant Award at IEEE WCCI IJCNN 2010 in Barcelona, Spain: Thai-Nghe Nguyen, co-author with Zeno Gantner, has got this award from the International Neural Network Society for their paper Cost-Sensitive Learning Methods for Imbalanced Data

Award at the WSDM Conference in New York: Steffen Rendle has won the Best Student Paper Award at the 3rd ACM Conference for Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010) in New York for his article Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization for Personalized Tag Recommendation.
ISMLL is involved in several research projects in the area of recommender systems: MyMedia and LEFOS.

ISMLL group wins this year's ECML/PKDD discovery challenge: The University of Hildesheim will not be easily forgotten after this year's ECML/PKDD discovery challenge ...
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Information Extraction at IFCS 2009: We organize the Session on Information Extraction and Information Retrieval at the Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies.
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EFRE Project - Lernende Empfehlungssysteme für Online-Shops (LEFOS): The LEFOS project has started in April 2009.
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