3rd ACM Digital Humanism Summer School

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Walter Palmetshofer

Digital Humanism is an interdisciplinary field that examines the complex interplay between technology and humankind with the aim of creating a better society and improving our lives. It recognizes that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary, breaking down disciplinary silos and integrating humanities, social, technical, and engineering sciences.

Detecting stereotyping of ethnicity using Natural Language Processing

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Anna Bon

Various studies have revealed that regular news sources create stereotypical impressions of ethnic minorities. In Norway, surveys conducted on Muslims and non-Muslims reveal that the Norwegian population sees news media as a significant source for this negative impression. There is little to no technical research conducted on how mainstream Norwegian news media writes about these minority groups. In her interdisciplinary master research project, Laréb Fatima Ahmad investigated using Natural Language ... Read more

Is software engineering gender inclusive?

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Anna Bon

Bias towards otherness is a reality in platforms or applications, and can be discriminatory and often detrimental towards minority groups, for example in gender. Is this bias introduced already by design, as part of the software engineering methodologies? And can this bias be explored, mitigated and inclusiveness increased? This is the problem tackled in the master research project by Marcel Stelte, focusing on bias towards members from the LGBT+ community, ... Read more

Are chatbots ready to replace humans in the workplace?

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Anna Bon

A master research project has tackled this question by observing and interviewing users in a large organization. Information Sciences student Sachira Tintar has tried to improve the responsivity of a chatbot, which is currently being implmented as a replacement for the usual helpdesk in the onboarding process of new staff. The first question is, evidently, if the chatbot – which is not equipped with a large language model such as ... Read more

Can AI give African farmers better rain forecasts?

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André Baart

Artificial Intelligence is being used in many areas and fields of application. In ICT for Development we are piloting AI projects to find out how to make AI useful for people in low resource environments. The thesis of Tom Siebring is one of these endeavors. In the West African Sahel, rains are erratic, while farmers mostly rely on rainfed agriculture. Weather forecasts are often unreliable, due to the lack of ... Read more

Predicting conflicts with data: explainable probabilistic forecasting – a master research project

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Anna Bon

Can we predict war using data and intelligent models? And how certain would we be in our predictions? A recent master research project by Oleksandr Zakotianskyi tries to answer these important questions… “A new wave of violent conflicts around the world raises concerns about the security of the whole world. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Conflict Index, 12% more conflicts occurred in 2023 compared to ... Read more

Hedy Programming Language Training: igniting passion for coding

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Cheah Wai Shiang

Digital Skills are at the heart of the Digital Europe Programme and the EURIDICE project. This is not different for Sarawak, Malaysia. Also there, many young people are interested to learn programming, but this is a challenge for them due to a lack of platform and support. For them, learning to code is challenging and only those studying computer science are able to do it. Yet, which programming language to ... Read more

“Make the bot speak your language”

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Anna Bon

This master research project in ICT4D, contributes, by placing human-centered design at the forefront, to the broader discourse on technology’s role in rural development.

Connected World Outreach event: Symposium “Perspectives on ICT4D”

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Hans Akkermans

A mini-symposium was devoted to ICT for Development in the Field. ICT4D is an interdisciplinary research topic, to explore design/deployment of digital technologies for communities in resource-contrained environments. It is based on a research program at VU that runs since 2009. Students following this course design socio-technological solutions based on use cases provided to them by users in rural regions of Africa and Asia.

EURIDICE presented at Aurora Biannual in Naples, 28 May 2024

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Anna Bon

Naples, 28 May 2024. The Vice-rector of Education of the University of Innsbruck, Prof. Dr. Bernhard Fügenschuh, presented EURIDICE and the novel European joint master curriculum as one of the educational innovations currently being designed by an expert team of the EURIDICE Consortium, in which academics from the University Federico II of Naples (UNINA), University of Innsbruck (UIBK), Palacky University Olomouc (UPOL) participate. A special session was devoted to discuss ... Read more