Information Engineering
We Derive Value from Data and Information
- How to leverage information?
- How to find new topics and trends?
- How to derive insight from heterogeneous/unstructured data and information?
- How to predict events?
- How can software learn from past events?
These are but a few of the questions that the Information Engineering (IE) group is working to answer. While the “data and information flood” is often discussed negatively, we see a great opportunity to leverage data and information using the right approaches – both at search-time, as well as during analysis.
The group transfers insights derived from research and development into teaching for students of the computer science curricula. It offers modules such as “Information Engineering 1 (Information Retrieval)”, “Information Engineering 2 (Data Warehousing & Big Data)”, “Artificial Intelligence 1”, “Artificial Intelligence 2”, and “Machine Learning”. The group is active in both national and international research projects of the EU framework programs.
Research Topics
The group is concerned with fundamental sub-disciplines of the field Data Science and is founding member of ZHAW Datalab.
Information Retrieval
Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with all facets of search relating to unstructured and semi-structured data. In particular, aspects from related Natural Language Processing sub-disciplines intersect with IR, leading to research areas such as cross-language retrieval. Further topics include multimedia retrieval, categorization, recommender services, question answering and topic/trend/event detection.
Databases and Information Systems
Databases, information systems and data warehousing are a range of areas that focus on processing of structured data/information and Big Data. Interesting aspects include efficient storage, administration and querying of this data, with the goal of supporting decision-making processes. A key line of investigation centres on the construction of natural-language interfaces to databases, thus enabling a natural, “human” dialog with such systems. Other topics include the application of machine learning algorithms to data management problems such as query optimization or data fusion.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are concerned with the design and analysis of smart systems through the use of machine learning methods, notably deep learning and reinforcement learning approaches. An important focus area is the successful handling of pattern recognition problems, e.g. in areas such as predictive maintenance, document analysis, object classification and detection in computer vision or speaker recognition. A common research thread across these diverse problem areas is the investigation of applicability and robustness of algorithms across different scales of data, as well as the interpretability of results.
Projects
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Good practices for responsible development of AI-based applications in healthcare
This project will identify proven methods, practices and standards that support responsible research and development of AI systems for health. They will be tested in use cases from medical imaging and neurotechnology, publicly released and published as a guideline of recommended best practices. ...
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Synthetic data generation of CoVID-19 CT/X-rays images for enabling fast triage of healthy vs. unhealthy patients
The automatic analysis of X-ray/CT images through artificial intelligence models can be useful to automate the clinical scanning procedure. Nonetheless, the limited access to real COVID patient data leads to the need of synthesizing image samples. The goal of this project is to use existing CT/X-ray image datasets ...
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Predictive replenishment of urban distribution centres for the decentralised food supply
Publications
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Brunner, Ursin; Stockinger, Kurt,
2021.
ValueNet : a natural language-to-SQL system that learns from database information [paper].
In:
Proceedings of the 37th ICDE.
International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Chania, Greece, 19-22 April 2021.
IEEE.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-22000
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Amirian, Mohammadreza; Tuggener, Lukas; Chavarriaga, Ricardo; Satyawan, Yvan Putra; Schilling, Frank-Peter; Schwenker, Friedhelm; Stadelmann, Thilo,
2021.
Two to trust : AutoML for safe modelling and interpretable deep learning for robustness [paper].
In:
1st TAILOR Workshop on Trustworthy AI at ECAI 2020, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 29-30 August 2020.
Springer.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-22061
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Liang, Shiqi; Stockinger, Kurt; de Farias, Tarcisio Mendes; Anisimova, Maria; Gil, Manuel,
2021.
Querying knowledge graphs in natural language.
Journal of Big Data.
8(3).
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-020-00383-w
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Stadelmann, Thilo; Würsch, Christoph,
2020.
Maps for an uncertain future : teaching AI and machine learning using the ATLAS concept.
Winterthur:
ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-20885
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Tuggener, Lukas; Amirian, Mohammadreza; Benites de Azevedo e Souza, Fernando; von Däniken, Pius; Gupta, Prakhar; Schilling, Frank-Peter; Stadelmann, Thilo,
2020.
Design patterns for resource-constrained automated deep-learning methods.
AI.
1(4),
pp.510-538.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.3390/ai1040031