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 allow a «natural» access to data?
- How can software link data automatically?
These are but a few of the questions that the Intelligent Information Systems (IIS) group of the InIT 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 research 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)” and "Databases". The group is active in both national and international research projects of the EU framework programs.
Research Topics
The Intelligent Information Systems group develops solutions for a changing, data-driven world. It performs research at the intersection of databases (DB), information retrieval (IR), data engineering (DE), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML)
The group covers two main research lines:
Big Data and Nano Data
We solve challenging problems when working with a range of datasets from very small (nano data) to very large (big data), where the nature of the problems change drastically as we work on different scales:
Current research:
- Information retrieval for small document collections
- Machine learning for query optimization
- Artificial intelligence for data integration and cleaning
- Quantum databases and quantum machine learning
Data Understanding
As we strive for "intelligent" solutions to data-driven problems, classical information systems need to process data at a different level, interpreting it to gain important information. Both structured and unstructured data must be processed not on a mechanical, but on a semantic level - e.g. by using natural language processing and understanding. Data is ultimately connected through graph structures or made accessible via semantic search.
Current research:
- Natural language interfaces for databases
- Semantic search on entities
- Knowledge graph construction
- Question answering over knowledge graphs
- Stream analytics and event detection
- Information retrieval evaluation
As part of the reorganization of the research database, the previous lists of research projects are no longer available. Die Zukunft geht in Richtung Volltextsuche und Filterung, um bestmögliche Suchergebnisse für unsere Besucher:innen zur Verfügung zu stellen.
In the meantime, you can easily find the projects via text search using the following link: «To the new search in the project database»
-
Fürst, Jonathan; Kosten, Catherine; Nooralahzadeh, Farhard; Zhang, Yi; Stockinger, Kurt,
2025.
Evaluating the data model robustness of Text-to-SQL systems based on real user queries [paper].
In:
Proceedings of EDBT 2025.
28th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), Barcelona, Spain, 25-28 March 2025.
Open Proceedings.
pp. 158-170.
Advances in Database Technology ; 28.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.48786/edbt.2025.13
-
de Meer Pardo, Fernando; Lehmann, Claude; Gehrig, Dennis; Nagy, Andrea; Nicoli, Stefano; Branka Hadji, Misheva; Braschler, Martin; Stockinger, Kurt,
2025.
GraLMatch : matching groups of entities with graphs and language models [paper].
In:
Proceedings of EDBT 2025.
28th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), Barcelona, Spain, 25-28 March 2025.
Open Proceedings.
pp. 1-12.
Advances in Database Technology ; 28.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.48786/edbt.2025.01
-
Berg, Michael; Furrer, Dirk; Thominet, Vincent; Wang, Xiaoqiang; Zeugin, Stefan; Grabner, Helmut; Stockinger, Kurt; Piamonteze, Cinthia,
2024.
distect : automatic sample-position tracking for X-ray experiments using computer vision algorithms.
Journal of Synchrotron Radiation.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600577524009536
-
Nooralahzadeh, Farhad; Zhang, Yi; Smith, Ellery; Maennel, Sabine; Matthey-Doret, Cyril; Raphaël, de Fondville; Stockinger, Kurt,
2024.
StatBot.Swiss : bilingual open data exploration in natural language [paper].
In:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024.
62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Bangkok, Thailand, 11-16 August 2024.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
pp. 5486-5507.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.326
-
Kittelmann, Florian; Sulimov, Pavel; Stockinger, Kurt,
2024.
QardEst : using quantum machine learning for cardinality estimation of join queries [paper].
In:
1st Workshop on Quantum Computing and Quantum-Inspired Technology for Data-Intensive Systems and Applications (Q-Data), ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024, Santiago, Chile, 9 June 2024.
ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-30917