Last week, Eva held an invited talk about "Evaluating the Users’ Experience: A Call for Utilizing Multi-Method Evaluations for Recommender Systems" at the Technical University (TU) Vienna, where she discussed how user-centric evaluations of recommender systems could be improved utilizing multiple perspectives. You can find the abstract of the talk on the news page of TU Vienna.

Our paper "HOT: A Height Optimized Trie Index for Main-Memory Database Systems" was accepted at the 2018 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data. The paper was co-authored by Robert Binna, Eva Zangerle, Martin Pichl, Günther Specht (all DBIS) and Viktor Leis from the Technical University Munich. The SIGMOD conference is among the most reknown and important venues in the field of core database systems (core ranking A*) and naturally, we are very happy about this huge success :)

At this year's ISMIR conference (International Society for Music Information Retrieval), taking place in Paris in September, Eva will be co-chairing the WiMIR events (Women in Music Information Retrieval) together with Audrey Laplante from the University of Montreal.

The DBIS team wishes merry christmas, happy holidays and all the best to you in the year to come :)

At the moment, the 19 IEEE Symposium on Multimedia takes place in Taichung, Taiwan. Yesterday, Martin held a talk about the joint research between the University of Innsbruck and the Johannes Kepler University: He presented the paper "Mining Culture-Specific Music Listening Behavior from Social Media Data" by Martin Pichl, Eva Zangerle, Grünther Specht and Markus Schedl. The paper was also presented in the poster session in the evening, triggering an interesting discussion with other researchers. 

This year, the 4th Digital Humanities Austria Conference will take place in Innsbruck. The DBIS team will be highly involved, taking part and presenting research on various topics:

• Eva Zangerle, Michael Tschuggnall, Stefan Wurzinger and Günther Specht will be presenting a poster on "Analyzing Coherent Characteristics in Music Playlists" (actually covering parts of Stefan's master thesis)
• Barbara Laner, Andy Stauder, Eva Zangerle and Theo Hug will be presenting a poster on "Visualization Strategies for Digital Archives. The Case of the Ernst-von-Glasersfeld-Archive"
• Gerald Hiebel, Claudia Posch, Gerhard Rampl, Elisabeth Gruber, Klaus Hanke and Eva Zangerle will present their work on "Semantics for Mountaineering History"
• Gerald Hiebel, Claudia Posch, Gerhard Rampl and Eva Zangerle have organized a panel on "Building Bridges - Corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities"

Also, Günther Specht and Eva Zangerle have served in the Program Committee of the conference and will be chairing a session at the conference.

This week, Doris Silbernagl will present her work on "Recommending OSM Tags to Improve Metadata Quality" at the ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Recommendations for Location-based Services and Social Networks (co-authored with Nikolaus Krismer, Nikolaus Augsten and Günther Specht).

Last week, Adelheid Heftberger presented our work on "Employing Wikidata for Fostering Scholarly Research" at WikidataCon, the largest conference on Wikidata, in Berlin. In this work, we propose a novel workflow that allows how an annotation tool may integrate articles of disciplines of the humanities to annotate these articles and to subsequently, automatically ingest the annotations into the Wikidata platform. A first prototype of such a workflow has already been developed in a cooperation of Eva Zangerle with Freie Universität Berlin, Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften and Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Please find further information on the publication on the according submission website and in the video recording of the presentation session (our talk begins at 16:15).

We are happy to announce a new publication success: Together with Markus Schedl from the Johannes Kepler University Linz we got the paper "Mining Culture-Specific Music Listening Behavior from Social Media Data" accepted at this year's IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, which is going to take happen in Taichung in December.

A warm welcome to all new computer science students from the DBIS team. This week, the "Brückenkrus Informatik" starts. As part of this course, DBIS makes an introduction to Python, one of the data science programming languages. 

This week, Michael Tschuggnall and Maximilian Mayerl presented their work at the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF).

Michael served as Task Chair of the Author Identification Task of the PAN workshop, Günther Specht also was member of the task committee there. The PAN workshop series deals with digital text forensics and includes challenges on e.g., author identification or obfuscation.

Also, MediaEval, a benchmarking initiative for multimedia retrieval, was co-located with CLEF. DBIS participated in the MediaEval challenge on Genre Classification (wrangling with hundreds of thousands of tracks and according features over weeks) and finished 2nd :) Maximilian presented our classification approach at the workshop.

Over the course of the last year, Eva took part in the WIMIR (Women in Information Retrieval) mentoring program. This programme is aimed at promoting the role of, and increasing opportunities for, women in the MIR field. In total, 50 mentees were matched with mentors based on their research interests and background. Eva served as a mentor for a female junior researcher in the MIR field. Participating in this programme was an enjoyable experience and hopefully, have a positive impact on the field :)

Please read more about the program in the WiMIR Mentoring Program Report 2017, WiMIR Mentoring 2017 Gratitude Wall and the WIMIR blog.

Looking for a Bachelor or Master Thesis topic? Want to write your Thesis @DBIS? We recently put new and interesting topics online. Check it out here.

Today, we welcome Anna and Julia, who participate at the SommerTechnikum programme of the University of Innsbruck. Anna and Julia will be working as interns at the DBIS group for the next four weeks and will investigate recommender systems together with us. They will further also attend a summer school about different MINT disciplines. 

Enjoy your time at DBIS :)

Our abstract "Bergnamen – Bergwelten. Toponymie im (Kon-)Text" just got accepted at the German Toponyme - Eine Standortbestimmung symposium. This publication is part of a cooperation of DBIS (Eva Zangerle) with Gerald Hiebel from the Unit for Surveying and Geoinformation, Faculty of Engineering Science, University of Innsbruck and Gerhard Rampl, Claudia Posch and Elisabeth Gruber from the Linguistics Department.