At the intersection of computer science and cognitive science, we conduct applied research into human-centered explainable AI and intelligent data-intensive systems and their application in technology-enhanced learning and knowledge management domains. Headed by Prof. Dr. Mohamed Amine Chatti, we take an interdisciplinary approach in designing and developing trustworthy human-centered AI technologies and novel analytics-driven methods and visualizations for tomorrow’s smart learning and working environments. We offer lectures, seminars, and practical courses in learning technologies, web technologies, data science, visual analytics, and human-AI interaction following a technology-enhanced, student-centered learning approach.

We're part of the Department of Human-centered Computing and Cognitive Science (HCCS), Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, one of the top universities in Germany.

News & Events

We participated in the 17th International Conference on Education Technology and Computers (ICETC 2025) in Barcelona, Spain, on September 18-21, 2025. Shoeb Joarder presented our platform OpenLAP to the ICETC community, highlighting its unique features to democratize learning analytics and support learning analytics stakeholders to co-design their own indicators. He presented our paper "The ISC Creator: Human-Centered Deisgn of Learning Analytics Interactive Indicator Specification Cards", which presents the systematic design, implementation, and evaluation details of the no-code, co-design tool, the OpenLAP ISC Creator, which allows low-cost and flexible design of LA indicators. The paper is available on arXiv here. 

Our papers “Inferring Prerequisite Knowledge Concepts in Educational Knowledge Graphs: A Multi-criteria Approach” by Rawaa Alatrash (preprint version available here ) and “An Optimized Pipeline for Automatic Educational Knowledge Graph Construction” by Qurat Ul Ain (preprint version available here), got accepted as full research papers in the 14th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Graphs 2025 (IJCKG 2025). 

We participated in the Ninth European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit (EMOOCs 2025) in Paris, France, from June 30th to July 2nd, 2025. EMOOCs is a key venue for research on large-scale online learning and innovation in MOOC platforms. We presented our MOOC platform CourseMapper to the EMOOCs community, highlighting its unique features to support collaborative and personalized learning. We had two accepted full research papers in the conference.  Qurat Ul Ain  presented our paper "Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Approaches for Automatic Educational Knowledge Graph Construction in CourseMapper", which explores two pipelines for automatically constructing Educational Knowledge Graphs (EduKGs) from PDF-based learning materials, showing that a Bottom-Up approach with a Human-in-the-Loop step leads to more accurate and reliable EduKGs in MOOCS (available on arXiv here).  Mohamed Abdelmagied  presented our paper "Leveraging Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Support Learners’ Understanding of Knowledge Concepts in MOOCs", introducing a Graph RAG pipeline that uses Educational and Personal Knowledge Graphs to guide learners in understanding complex concepts through personalized question generation and answering. Paper is available on arXiv here.
 

Our papers “Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Approaches for Automatic Educational Knowledge Graph Construction in CourseMapper” by Qurat Ul Ain (available on arXiv here) and “Leveraging Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Support Learners' Understanding of Knowledge Concepts in MOOCs” by Mohamed Abdelmagied (available on arXiv here) got accepted as full research papers on the 9th European MOOCs stakeholders Summit 2025 (EMOOCs 2025).

Our paper “The ISC Creator: Human-Centered Design of Learning Analytics Interactive Indicator Specification Cards” by Shoeb Joarder got accepted as a full research paper on the 17th International Conference on Education Technology and Computers (ICETC 2025). A link to the paper on arXiv is available here.

In the upcoming summer semester 2025, we will offer a lab course on "Human-Centered Learning Analytics (HCLA)". In this lab, bachelor and master students from different study programs at the Faculty of Computer Science will work together on the evaluation and further development of transparent and interactive user interfaces that enable different stakeholders (e.g., students, teachers, researchers) to co-design and implement learning analytics indicators and dashboards with minimum effort. More information about the lab is available here. Registration is still possible until March 17th. Places are limited.

The Social Computing group was present at the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2024) in Bari, Italy, from October 14-18, 2024. RecSys is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results, systems, and techniques in the broad field of recommender systems, well attended by researchers and industries around the globe. We were excited to present our latest work on user control and transparency at the 11th Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS). At the workshop, Qurat Ul Ain presented our paper titled "Designing and Evaluating an Educational Recommender System with Different Levels of User Control", contributing valuable insights into the impact of control levels on transparency, trust, and satisfaction. Here is the link to the paper.

On September 2 & 3, 2024, Qurat Ul Ain and Shoeb Joarder attended the 3rd Learning AID at the Ruhr-University of Bochum. The conference and workshop were 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.

Qurat presented our ongoing research on transparent recommender systems and demonstrated how our MOOC platform CourseMapper enables user interaction and control over the input, process, and output of an educational recommender system to enhance the learning experience. CourseMapper is available here.

Shoeb presented our ongoing Human-Centered Learning Analytics (HCLA) research and demoed the Indicator Editor in our Open Learning Analytics Platform (OpenLAP). The Indicator Editor provides an intuitive user interface that supports self-service learning analytics by empowering end-users to take control of the indicator development process. A demo can be found here.

After a lengthy review process, our paper "Visualization for Recommendation Explainability: A Survey and New Perspectives" has just been published in the prestigious ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems and is now available online. This publication is particularly relevant for those who want to learn more about the theoretical background of visual explanations in AI and recommender systems and how to systematically develop explanatory visualizations in recommender systems. For more details, you can read the paper here. And, here is the link to the paper on arXiv.

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