LWDA Conference in Mannheim

Authors: Andreas Lommatzsch and Asmaa Haja.

The conference “Lernen Wissen, Daten, Analysen” has been held in Darmstadt August 22-24, 2018. The conference is organized by the German Computer Science Society (GI) and consists of 5 tracks: Information Retrieval (FGIR 2018), Knowledge Management (FGWM 2018), Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining, and Machine Learning (KDML 2018, Business Intelligence (WSBI 2018), and Large-Scale Data Management and Processing – Applications in Research and Industry (FGDB 2018).

The conferences program consists of research paper presentation, a poster session and four interesting keynotes from different domains. The first keynote was given by Daniela Nicklas. The talk discussed the question of who watches the sensors, which are used for monitoring real-world phenomena. The second keynote, given by Kerstin Bach, explained the “selfBACK” decision support system (DSS) project. The system uses Case-Based Reasoning for supporting patients with low back pains. Frank Giesler presented the third talk. He introduced a tried-and-tested approach that ensures successful data-driven digital product development through the close involvement of future users. The last talk, given by Stephan Mandt, gave an overview of some exciting recent developments in deep probabilistic modeling, which combines deep neural networks with probabilistic models for unsupervised learning.

The DAI-Labor presented the research conducted in the student project. Our paper “Normalization of Time series for Improving Recommendations” studies how observed log data in recommender systems can be decomposed into several different characteristic patterns. We explain that the decomposition is the basis for understanding the lifecycle of the items and the characteristic user preferences. Furthermore, the decomposition can be used for trend-based prediction, extrapolating the extracted time series taking into account the characteristic patterns. The methods have been studied in a News Recommendation scenario that is characterized by a continuously changing set of items and strong variances in the number of users during the day.
In addition to a talk, we also presented a poster allowing us to discuss details of the scenario and our approach individually.

Overall, the conference provided many interesting talks covering a wide spectrum of topics. The positive atmosphere has been the basis for exciting discussion.

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