2022, Pande, Charuta, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Martin, Andreas

Besides the typical applications of recommender systems in B2C scenarios such as movie or shopping platforms, there is a rising interest in transforming the human-driven advice provided, e.g., in consultancy via the use of recommender systems. We explore the special characteristics of such knowledge-based B2B services and propose a process that allows incorporating recommender systems into them. We suggest and compare several recommender techniques that allow incorporating the necessary contextual knowledge (e.g., company demographics). These techniques are evaluated in isolation on a test set of business intelligence consultancy cases. We then identify the respective strengths of the different techniques and propose a new hybridisation strategy to combine these strengths. Our results show that the hybridisation leads to substantial performance improvement over the individual methods.

2021, Pande, Charuta, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Martin, Andreas, Montecchiari, Devid, Martin, Andreas, Hinkelmann, Knut, Fill, Hans-Georg, Gerber, Aurona, Lenat, Dough, Stolle, Reinhard, Harmelen, Frank van

We present an approach to improve individual and self-regulated learning in group assignments. We focus on supporting individual reflection by providing feedback through a conversational system. Our approach leverages machine learning techniques to recognize concepts in student utterances and combines them with knowledge representation to infer the student’s understanding of an assignment’s cognitive requirements. The conversational agent conducts end-to-end conversations with the students and prompts them to reflect and improve their understanding of an assignment. The conversational agent not only triggers reflection but also encourages explanations for partial solutions.

2020, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Diwanji, Prajakta, Hinkelmann, Knut, Dornberger, Rolf

2019, Inglese, Terry, von Kutzschenbach, Michael, Witschel, Hans Friedrich

Contrary to the dominant appearance of the topic ‘digitalization,’ a majority of managers do not know what it means and how they can leverage the development of new technologies and disruptive innovations for their business. Furthermore, doing business is getting increasingly complex due to globalization and specialization. Thus, it looks like everybody is hyperactively looking for an external solution to their managerial challenges while, at the same time, managers seem to have lost their intuition for future direction and are unable to step back and think about intended and unintended consequences of the digital revolution. We, who provide business management education for future leaders, are concerned about this development and teach our students to appreciate the discomfort with the hard work of thinking and reflecting to learn from the insights about innovation, strategy and personal development to achieve improved leadership competence. In this paper, we will present our lessons learnt from asking students of a leadership class at an applied university to write a reflective journal for deep learning purpose.

2022, Sandhu, Gurmit, Kilburg, Anne, Martin, Andreas, Pande, Charuta, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Laurenzi, Emanuele, Billing, Erik, Hinkelmann, Knut, Gerber, Aurona

Preschool children, when diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), often ex- perience a long and painful journey on their way to self-advocacy. Access to standard of care is poor, with long waiting times and the feeling of stigmatization in many social set- tings. Early interventions in ASD have been found to deliver promising results, but have a high cost for all stakeholders. Some recent studies have suggested that digital biomarkers (e.g., eye gaze), tracked using affordable wearable devices such as smartphones or tablets, could play a role in identifying children with special needs. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of supporting neurodiverse children with technologies based on digital biomark- ers which can help to a) monitor the performance of children diagnosed with ASD and b) predict those who would benefit most from early interventions. We describe an ongoing feasibility study that uses the “DREAM dataset”, stemming from a clinical study with 61 pre-school children diagnosed with ASD, to identify digital biomarkers informative for the child’s progression on tasks such as imitation of gestures. We describe our vision of a tool that will use these prediction models and that ASD pre-schoolers could use to train certain social skills at home. Our discussion includes the settings in which this usage could be embedded.

2021, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Riesen, Kaspar, Grether, Loris, Cucchiara, Rita, Fred, Ana, Filipe, Joaquim

Large knowledge graphs hold the promise of helping knowledge workers in their tasks by answering simple and complex questions in specialised domains. However, searching and exploring knowledge graphs in current practice still requires knowledge of certain query languages such as SPARQL or Cypher, which many untrained end users do not possess. Approaches for more user-friendly exploration have been proposed and range from natural language querying over visual cues up to query-by-example mechanisms, often enhanced with recommendation mechanisms offering guidance. We observe, however, a lack of user studies indicating which of these approaches lead to a better user experience and optimal exploration outcomes. In this work, we make a step towards closing this gap by conducting a qualitative user study with a system that relies on formulating queries in natural language and providing answers in the form of subgraph visualisations. Our system is able to offer guidance via query recommendations based on a current context. The user study evaluates the impact of this guidance in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness (recall) of user sessions. We find that both aspects are improved, especially since query recommendations provide inspiration, leading to a larger number of insights discovered in roughly the same time.

2020, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Riesen, Kaspar, Grether, Loris, Jose, Joemon M., Yilmaz, Emine, Magalhães, João, Castells, Pablo, Ferro, Nicola, Silva, Mário J., Martins, Flávio

Exploring a knowledge base is often an iterative process: initially vague information needs are refined by interaction. We propose a novel approach for such interaction that supports sequential question answering (SQA) on knowledge graphs. As opposed to previous work, we focus on exploratory settings, which we support with a visual representation of graph structures, helping users to better understand relationships. In addition, our approach keeps track of context – an important challenge in SQA – by allowing users to make their focus explicit via subgraph selection. Our results show that the interaction principle is either understood immediately or picked up very quickly – and that the possibility of exploring the information space iteratively is appreciated.

2021, Pande, Charuta, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Martin, Andreas

Practitioners in business information systems are frequently faced with tasks that involve interpretation and representation of organizational information as models, e.g. business processes, the involved participants, and data. Usually, this information comes from varied sources like stakeholders and documents, often resulting in subjective, biased, or incomplete information. Simulating a realistic organizational environment is important for the education of future business process experts, but challenging to achieve in the educational setting. In this work, we propose a chatbot-based educational adventure game that can introduce complex and often contradictory sources of information in a fun learning approach and help the students in abstracting and interpreting this information, constructing models as an outcome. We elaborate on the first design ideas and requirements.

2020, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Pande, Charuta, Martin, Andreas, Laurenzi, Emanuele, Hinkelmann, Knut, Dornberger, Rolf

2019, Witschel, Hans Friedrich, Peter, Marco, Seiler, Laura, Parlar, Soyhan, Gatziu Grivas, Stella, Bernardino, Jorge, Salgado, Ana, Filipe, Joaquim

In this work, we develop a case model to structure cases of past digital transformations which act as input data for a recommender system. The purpose of that recommender is to act as an inspiration and support for new cases of digital transformation. To define the case model, case analyses, where 40 cases of past digital transformations are analysed and coded to determine relevant attributes and values, literature research and the particularities of the case for digital change, are used as a basis. The case model is evaluated by means of an experiment where two different scenarios are fed into a prototypical case-based recommender system and then matched, based on an entropically derived weighting system, with the case base that contains cases structured according to the case model. The results not only suggest that the case model’s functionality can be guaranteed, but that a good quality of the given recommendations is achieved by applying a case-based recommender system using the proposed case model. The results not only suggest that the case model’s functionality can be guaranteed, but that a good quality of the given recommendations is achieved by applying a case-based recommender system using the proposed case model.