Welcome to the Social Computing Group

January 2024New Publication in Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence

In our new paper "ConceptGCN: Knowledge concept recommendation in MOOCs based on knowledge graph convolutional networks and SBERT", recently published in Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, we propose ConceptGCN, an end-to-end framework that combines knowledge graphs, graph convolutional networks, and transformer sentence encoders to enhance the representations of knowledge concepts and learner models and provide personalized and explainable recommendation of concepts in our MOOC platform CourseMapper. The paper is available as open access here.

December 2023OpenLAP @ Lehrkräftefortbildung Informatik 2023

On December 1, 2023, Shoeb Joarder attended the Lehrkräftefortbildung Informatik 2023. He presented our ongoing work on Human-Centered Learning Analytics (HCLA) with Open Learning Analytics Platform (OpenLAP), our platform for self-service learning analytics. He showed a demo of OpenLAP in action, with a focus on the Indicator Specification Card (ISC) Creator and the Indicator Editor in OpenLAP.

October 2023New Publication in IJHCI

Our paper "Interactive Explanation with Varying Level of Details in an Explainable Scientific Literature Recommender System" has been published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI)In this work, we show how to design explanations with different levels of detail, in a systematic and theoretically-sound manner. Further, we highlight the positive impact of user-controlled, interactive explanation with varying level of details on the perception of explainable recommendation. A preprint version of the paper is available here.

October 2023New Publication in Information Journal

Our paper "Automatic Construction of Educational Knowledge Graphs: A Word Embedding-Based Approach" has been published in the Information Journal.  In this work, we aimed at improving the concept extraction and weighting mechanisms in educational knowledge graphs (EduKGs) by leveraging state-of-the-art word and sentence embedding techniques. The paper is available as open access here.

September 2023New Publication in MTI Journal

Our paper "Semantic Interest Modeling and Content-Based Scientific Publication Recommendation Using Word Embeddings and Sentence Encoders" has been published in the Multimodal Technologies and Interaction Journal. In this work, we combine word embedding-based keyphrase extraction techniques with knowledge bases to generate semantically-enriched user interest models, and we leverage pretrained transformer sentence encoders to represent user models and papers and compute their similarities.  The paper is available as open access here.  

August 2023OpenLAP @ Learning AID

On August 28 & 29, 2023, Shoeb Joarder attended the 2nd Learning AID at the Ruhr-University of Bochum. The conference and workshop was organized by the state funded project KI:edu.nrw – a project to promote Didactics, Ethics and Technology of Learning Analytics and AI in Higher Education.  The event focused on the practical use of learning analytics, artificial intelligence, and data mining in higher education. Shoeb presented our ongoing research on Human-Centered Learning Analytics (HCLA) and gave a demo on the ISC Creator module in our Open Learning Analytics Platform (OpenLAP). The ISC Creator provides an intuitive user interface that allows the low-cost design of low-fidelity Learning Analytics indicators using Indicator Specification Cards. A demo can be found here.

July 2023New Publication in Information Journal

You might be interested in understanding the difference between Transparency and Justification in explainable recommender systems. Check out our contribution "Justification vs. Transparency: Why and How Visual Explanations in a Scientific Literature Recommender System" which is published in the Information Journal  as part of the Special Issue "Information Visualization Theory and Applications". The paper is available as open access here.

May 2023New Publication on Visually Explainable Recommendation

Interested to learn more about visual explanation in recommender systems? Check out our paper "Visualization for Recommendation Explainability: A Survey and New Perspectives" at the following link.

May 2023New Publication in ExUM@UMAP 2023

Our paper "Validation of the EDUSS Framework for Self-Actualization Based on Transparent User Models: A Qualitative Study" got accepted as a full research paper at the workshop on Explainable User Models and Personalized System (ExUM 2023) in conjunction with the conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (ACM UMAP 2023). A preprint version of the paper is available here.

April 2023Clara Siepmann presenter at the CHI'23 HCXAI Workshop

On April 28th and 29th, 2023, Clara Siepmann attended the Human-Centered Explainable AI Workshop at the CHI'23 conference. She presented our paper "Trust and Transparency in Recommender Systems". In this work, we argue that exploration and explanation can be seen as two ends of a spectrum, with both having the potential to help the user achieve transparency and therefore trust. We referred to the combination of both approaches as exploranation.  The paper can be found here.

March 2023Shoeb Joarder presenter and co-moderator at the LAK'23 HCLA Workshop

On March 13, 2023, we co-organized the Fourth International Workshop on Human-Centered Learning Analytics (HCLA) at the LAK’23 conference. Shoeb Joarder co-moderated the table discussion on “How can we create trustworthy LA systems?”. Furthermore, he presented our paper "Towards a Flexible User Interface for ‘Quick and Dirty’ Learning Analytics Indicator Design". In this work, we present the development details of an intuitive and theoretically-sound Indicator Specification Cards (ISC) user interface that allows the low-cost design of learning analytics indicators. The paper can be found here. A demo of the ISC user interface in OpenLAP can be found here.

Where to find us

We are located in the 4th floor of building LE - Campus Duisburg
Forsthausweg 2
47057 Duisburg

Post Address

Universität Duisburg-Essen
Fakultät für Ingenieurwissenschaften
Abteilung INKO
Fachgebiet Social Computing
47048 Duisburg