Keynote Lectures

Eyeing the Web
Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, Germany

Making News Credible Again
Karl Aberer, EPFL, Switzerland, Switzerland

Engineering Information Systems for Cloud, Edge and IoT
Claus Pahl, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, Italy

Eyeing the Web

Steffen Staab
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Brief Bio
Steffen is full professor for Databases and Information Systems at the Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany, and full professor for Web and Computer Science at University of Southampton, UK. He studied in Erlangen (Germany), Philadelphia (USA) and Freiburg (Germany) computer science and computational linguistics. In his research career he has managed to avoid almost all good advice that he now gives to his team members. Such advice includes focusing on research (vs. company) or concentrating on only one or two research areas (vs. considering ontologies, semantic web, social web, data engineering, text mining, peer-to-peer, multimedia, HCI, services, software modelling and programming and some more). Though, actually, improving how we understand and use text and data is a good common denominator for a lot of Steffen’s professional activities.

Abstract
For most people, the dominating sense they use to interact with the Web is their eye sight.
However, web site providers do neither understand very well what users see when they look at their web site nor can they help the user to exploit her eye sight as an interaction modality. While eye tracking devices have become commercial commodity products, what has been lacking is the contextualized understanding of eye sight. Web browsers are almost unique software applications as they require an (almost) declarative representation of the user interface. We have engineered solutions that map eye traces and fixations onto interface regions and interaction widgets.
In the EU project Mamem we have used such mappings to facilitate hands-free Web interaction, especially for motor-impaired individuals. In collaboration with the company EyeVido, we use these mappings to mine user viewing behavior. We envision that eye sight will become a major interaction modality for the Web in the future, but for this we also suggest that Web browsers remain transparent, declarative-oriented applications that are so accessible and modifiable that we can develop methods that involve all our senses.

Making News Credible Again

Karl Aberer
EPFL, Switzerland

Brief Bio
Karl Aberer is a full professor for Distributed Information Systems at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland, since 2000. His research interests are on semantics in distributed information systems with applications in peer-to-peer search, data integration, semantic web, trust management and social, mobile and sensor networks. Karl Aberer received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zürich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992 he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. From 2005 to 2012 he was the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems. From 2012 to 2016 he was Vice-President of EPFL responsible for information systems. He is co-founder and CEO of LinkAlong, a startup established in 2017 providing analytics capabilities for open source documents based on technologies for knowledge extraction developed in his research. He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He has also been consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council (SWTR) from 2004 to 2011.

Abstract
We are living in a time where the digital transformation of media has contributed to the ubiquitous dissemination of fake facts and a credibility crisis with news media. News are generated today differently, increasingly automating the process using machine intelligence, and news are generated by different actors, with social media enabling everyone, including malicious actors, to become the source of news. These developments have fuelled an inflation of fake news.

We will first review some of the key developments that affect today the space of news media. Then we turn our attention to the question of how we can address some of the problems using technology, in particular artificial intelligence. The first problem we consider will be news bias. We show that bias exists in various forms and outline methods to fight it. The second problem we consider will be fake news, in particular in the science domain. We will introduce our approach and platform for evaluating the quality of scientific news articles employing automated methods. These efforts are in our view critical in helping to reestablish trusted news channels and give citizen a chance to obtain truthful and unbiased information in the future.

Engineering Information Systems for Cloud, Edge and IoT

Claus Pahl
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Brief Bio
Claus Pahl is a full professor of software engineering at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, and the co-ordinator of the Software and Systems research group. He is also the Director of the Faculty’s PhD programme. He received a M.Sc. degree from the Technical University of Braunschweig and a PhD from the University of Dortmund. He has held academic positions at Dublin City University, University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin and the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, before. He has been a visiting researcher and guest professor at universities in Oldenburg (Germany), Edinburgh (UK), and Shenyang (China). His research interests lie in the software engineering field, specifically focusing on software architecture. Service engineering and cloud/IoT architectures have served as a specific application context for his architecture research – looking into migration, architecture specification, dynamic quality and performance engineering. He has published more than 300 journal and conference papers including all top cloud publications. He has been awarded more than 5.5m Euro in research funding from national and international sources, involving both industry and academia. From 2013 to 2016 he has been Principal Investigator and Cloud Architecture Area Leader of the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce IC4, a National Technology Centre that is operated between 3 Universities and works together with more than 40 industry members. He has been involved as member of the Executive Board for Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre (a National Research Centre with more than 150 researchers working across 7 universities) and acted as Director of the CloudCORE Cloud Computing Research Centre. He has been an evaluator for research and innovation projects in 9 countries across Europe, North America and Asia and has reviewed many FP7 and H2020 projects for more than a decade. Currently, he works on the H2020 project 5G-CARMEN, where he investigates performance engineering aspects for edge cloud architectures.

Abstract
Information Systems have been moved into the cloud for many years and recently also into more distributed edge and IoT environments. In addition, applications have become more mobile. In this presentation, I will address engineering techniques that help to migrate and let run software effectively and efficiently in these environments. Software architecture, both from a structural but also a dynamic perspective, is crucial here. The role that microservices and containers as units of development and deployment play shall be investigated. Patterns can help to frame these in terms of the structural architecture. From a more dynamic perspective, systems become more dynamic and are often (self)-adaptive. DevOps for more rapid, automated release cycles is a solution for continuous evolution, as are controllers for more autonomous and immediate adaptation.The increasingly important management of performance and dependability, but also trust in these distributed, heterogeneous environments shall also be discussed in this presentation.