Die Mitglieder der KD2School trauern um ihre visionäre und engagierte Professorin Dr. Nora Szech. Mit ihr vermissen wir eine herausragende Ökonomin, die unser Graduiertenkolleg in vielfältiger Weise bereichert hat – als Kollegin, Forscherin, Betreuerin und Mentorin.

Nach dem Studium der Mathematik und der Volkswirtschaftslehre an der Universität Bonn und einer kurzen Tätigkeit im Investmentbanking, absolvierte Nora Szech im Jahre 2010 die Promotion an der Bonn Graduate School of Economics. Im Jahre 2012 nahm sie einen Ruf auf eine Professur für Industrieökonomie an der Universität Bamberg an. Im Jahre 2013 folgte sie dem Ruf an das Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) auf die Professur für Politische Ökonomie am Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre (ECON). Trotz zahlreicher Angebote von anderen Universitäten blieb sie dem KIT seither treu.

Nora Szech hat sich in kürzester Zeit mit einer Reihe von hervorragenden und viel beachteten Forschungsbeiträgen national und international einen ausgezeichneten Ruf erworben und gehörte zu den herausragenden Persönlichkeiten ihrer Generation in der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Forschung. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte lagen im Bereich der Verhaltensökonomie, des Marktdesgin, der Experimentalökonomie und der Spieltheorie. Ein zentrales Thema ihrer Forschung war das Zusammenspiel von Märkten und Moral.

Nora Szech war Mitglied zahlreicher akademischer Gesellschaften und Vereine, unter anderem als Fellow des Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung und des CESifo Research Network. Sie war Mitglied des Theoretischen Ausschusses des Vereins für Socialpolitik, in dem sie sich auch jahrelang um die Frauenförderung bemüht hat. Sie war Trägerin des Promotionspreises der Universität Bonn, des Reinhard-Selten Preises des Vereins für Socialpolitik und mehrfache Preisträgerin von Lehrpreisen sowohl an der Universität Bonn als auch am KIT. Mit ihrer breiten Expertise im Bereich der Verhaltensökonomie war Nora Szech auch äußerst erfolgreich in der Einwerbung von Forschungsmitteln. An zahlreichen aktuellen Forschungsinitiativen der KIT-Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften war sie maßgeblich beteiligt.

Praktische Relevanz ihrer Forschung und Wissenschaftskommunikation lagen Nora Szech besonders am Herzen. Sie hat sich regelmäßig mit fundierten Beiträgen zu aktuellen Themen in den Medien zu Wort gemeldet und an zahlreichen öffentlichen Paneldiskussionen teilgenommen.

Ihre Begeisterung für akademische Forschung und ihre außergewöhnliche Fähigkeit, andere dabei mitzureißen und zu inspirieren, werden den Kolleginnen und Kollegen, den Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern sowie den Studierenden der Fakultät in lebhafter Erinnerung bleiben.

Mit Nora Szech haben das Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre, die KIT-Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften und das gesamte KIT eine herausragende Forscherin und engagierte Kollegin verloren. Der Elan, mit dem sie ihre zahlreichen akademischen Projekte verfolgte, wurde jäh durchbrochen. Wir werden Nora Szech schmerzlich vermissen. Unser Mitgefühl gilt ihrer Familie und ihren Angehörigen.

Zum Nachruf der KIT Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften

Heads-Up KIT Students!

In the coming semester, the seminar "user-adaptive systems". will be offered. User-adaptive systems collect and analyze user biosignals to recognize user states as a basis for adaptation. Thermic, mechanical, electric, acoustic, and optical signals are collected using sensors integrated into wearables, e.g. glasses, earphones, belts, or bracelets. The collected data is processed with analytics and machine learning techniques to determine short-term, evolving over time, and long-term user states in the form of user characteristics, affective-cognitive states, or behavior. Finally, the recognized user states are leveraged for realizing user-centric adaptations.

In this seminar, interdisciplinary teams of students design, develop, and evaluate a user-adaptive system prototype leveraging state-of-the-art hard- and software.

The description of the topics can be found on the Wiwiportal. Topic preferences can also be indicated there.

Virtual Reality and Eye Tracking are increasingly used in research and practice as they offer numerous new opportunities. Through a well-balanced combination of theoretical and practical learning, the students gained new insights and expanded their knowledge of these cutting-edge technologies.

A big thank you goes to the NIDIT Lab Team who provided hardware and assistance during the hands-on portion of the workshop.

Over the course of the past few months, KD2Schools PhD projects have been taking shape. With that came a number of networking opportunities, especially in the form of conferences. We summarise some of the experiences in this short conference report series.

In August, our graduate student Tim Schneegans published and presented a brief paper at the International Symposium for Wearable Computing (ISWC). The ISWC (iswc.net) is a premier interdisciplinary venue in which leading international researchers, designers, developers, and practitioners in the field present and discuss novel results in all aspects of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This includes the design, development, and deployment of ubiquitous and pervasive computing technologies and the understanding of human experiences and social impacts that these technologies facilitate.
This work was done in collaboration with our partners at the TECO Lab for Pervasive Computing, Leon Simmon and Michael Beigl. In their paper, they explored how sensors can contribute to preserving data privacy while processing human speech data. Human speech data plays a major role for Wearable Systems, Clinical Research in everyday life, and adaptive systems that work with voice input.

See the full paper here

With our 1-year anniversary, our KD2School group gathered in Bremen to celebrate and renew our scholastic, collective endeavours: to advance the science on adaptive systems for economic decision-making. We were warmly welcomed in Bremen in the Atlantic Hotel - a great venue for our meetings, presentations, poster sessions and various workshops.

The retreat also saw a comprehensive introduction to the various research activities of the Cognitive Systems Lab (Prof. Tanja Schultz) - with impressive prototype demonstrations and fresh research results. With Prof. Thorsten Pachur (TU Munich) we were also very happy to welcome our first guest speaker at a retreat. His presentation on decision-making under risk sparked discussion and has certainly left inspiring impressions in our attending research group. We are - once again - already looking forward to our next retreat!

Here are some photographic impressions of the retreat:

Over the course of the past few months, KD2Schools PhD projects have been taking shape. With that came a number of networking opportunities, especially in the form of conferences. We summarise some of the experiences in this short conference report series.

In September Tom Reuscher participated in the European Summer School on Eye Movements (ESSEM) in Bonn. Since 2013, the six-day workshop has brought together internationally renowned researchers to provide insights into the scientific foundations and various application areas of eye tracking research. The lectures cover a variety of topics, ranging from psychological research to HCI. ESSEM 2022 was attended by over 80 students and more than 20 speakers from 17 different countries. Thus, it offered a great opportunity to network with other students and to exchange ideas with experienced scholars. As part of his participation, Tom Reuscher was able to benefit from the interdisciplinary discourse by presenting his current research project (a structured literature review on multiparty eye-tracking in synchronous computer-mediated collaboration) in a poster session.

On 16th of May the first guest lecture of our graduate school program about “Research on Effects of Social Media on Mental Health and Wellbeing – Mechanisms, Consequences and Implications for Adaptive Technologies” took place at the KD2Lab in Karlsruhe. The lecturer Prof. Dr. Adrian Meier is Assistant Professor for Communication Science at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg.

His research investigates the consequences of digital communication for well-being, mental health, and self-regulation, particularly at the interface between work and leisure (e.g., digital stress, procrastination with media). Previously, Adrian Meier worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam (Oct. 2020 – Jan. 2021) and as Research Associate at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (2015 – 2020). We want to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Meier very much indeed for his remarkable presentation and our subsequent discussion about interdisciplinary research that brings together several disciplines like Psychology, Communication Science and Technological Design.

The end of March marked another milestone for the KD2School. With the start of Nicola Hüholt and Negin Javaheri, the first PhD student cohort is now complete. This means that the research work of the KD2School is now fully underway.

These fast-paced early-stage dynamics with so many new scholars coming together were the perfect timing for everyone to meet for the first KD2School retreat. Bad Herrenalb in the south of Germany provided us with a perfect setting for a few moments of reflecting, brainstorming, discussing and networking. Over several days the PhD students, associated members, and PIs used this opportunity to present and discuss a wide variety of research topics, all within the central context of KD2School: researching and developing the next generation of adaptive systems.

We saw promising presentations that span topics like novel measurement methods for ecologically valid behavioral data acquisition, innovative algorithmic approaches to make AI models explainable that work with sensor data, but also various experiment design ideas that aim to better understand mental states and social interactions within adaptive systems.

With so many aspirational scholars, the retreat helped reshape ideas and communication, and it also was a lot of fun! Thus, we are looking forward to the next retreat already!

Some impressions from the first KD2School retreat:

With Dr. Rafael Reisenhofer the KD2School team is now completed with a second PostDoc.

Dr. Reisenhofer obtained a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Bremen under the supervision of Prof. Emily King. Prior to becoming a member of KD2School, he was the principle investigator of the FWF Lise Meitner project “Depth and discriminability in deep learning architectures” and a postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematics of Data Science group of Prof. Philipp Grohs at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on interdisciplinary projects which require the application of complex mathematical concepts and models in applied areas of research. This includes works on such diverse topics as perceptual image similarity, visual servoing (robotics), deep learning-based quantum Monte Carlo (computational chemistry), and the forecasting of financial time series with convolutional neural networks.

At the KD2School, Dr. Reisenhofer is responsible for the conceptualization, implementation and integration of lab linking models that aim at providing the members of KD2School with a joint experimental environment that encompasses all technical and methodological resources that are available at the involved labs in Karlsruhe, Bremen and Gießen. The main goal behind lab linking is to facilitate previously impossible experimental designs in which participants, sensors and devices can interact synchronized and in real-time across locations that might be hundreds of kilometres apart from each other.

We are excited to welcome Dr. Ivo Benke as a new team member to the KD2School. In his role in the KD2School, he will be responsible for the areas of research and integration. Research wise, he will guide the research topic “Emotion-adaptive Hybrid Work & Learning” at the IISM.

Dr. Ivo Benke conducted his PhD at the Institute of Information Systems and Marketing (IISM) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche. In his research Ivo Benke has investigated the design of emotion-adaptive systems to create better users’ experiences in remote work collaboration. Further, he has focused on design-tradeoffs of such emotion-adaptive systems with regards to user autonomy and ethical design principles.

In his research at the KD2School, Ivo Benke will investigate the design and boundaries of emotion-adaptive systems in the context of work and learning. One focus will be on the downsides of overadaptation and the exploration of antecedents for negative consequences such as addiction.

The German broadcaster ARD recently published a documentary about robots as our partners of the future. The documentary featured IISM's doctoral researcher Florian Onur Kuhlmeier, who is designing a chatbot to treat depression in youth (CADY). He spoke about why such a chatbot is necessary, how humans can form relationships with chatbots, what the project's roadmap looks like and how large language models (such as GPT-3) will enable the next generation of intelligent chatbots to support mental health. The documentary was recorded in the KD2Lab - one of the main laboratories in the KD2School. Florian and the CADY project are funded by the Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (SDW) as part of their PhD scholarship programme.

Watch in the ARD Mediathek (KD²Lab appearance starting from minute 16)

What a month! With the past October, the KD2School has officially kicked off with impressive numbers. With almost 80 applications for the PhD and PostDoc positions, we have had an intense search process for the KD2School project positions, spanning over several application events. The result is a formidable first cohort of interdisciplinary scholars: Economists, psychologists, computer scientists and information systems students are now gathering in the KD2School to bring forth the next generation of adaptive systems research.

As the research commences, we are now in the middle of assembling the teams, not only in the KD2Lab, but also in our very own KD2Loft. Beyond that, we have now also seen the first presentations by PI and KD2School members in our lecture series already. Prof. Weinhardt introduced research on adaptive mechanisms in online platforms and Prof. Ebner-Priemer has presented how adaptive technologies are used in real-world ambulatory assessment research. With much more input and creativity in front of us, we are looking forward to what the storming period in our group will bring. Stay tuned for more updates from the KD2School here!

Some impressions from our first events: