also won the DB & JRE Open Data Hackathon held  on 12./13.05.2017 in Berlin (~200 Participants):  https://www.mindboxberlin.com/index.php/db-hackathon-may-2017.html

In addition to that,  they were invited ( full financed) from the East Japan Railway Company (JRE) to travel to Japan and work together on their systems and perhaps implementing their idea there.

“Durch die Konfrontation mit aktuellen Problemstellungen aus der Praxis konnten wir unser theoretisches Fachwissen um wertvolle Erfahrungen bezüglich der Entwicklung innovativer Lösungen erweitern. Derartige Veranstaltungen sollten unserer Meinung nach in Zukunft häufiger angeboten werden.” – Patrick Klose und Nicolas Pfeffer

Dr. Karsten Tolle, Director of the Frankfurt Big Data Lab, has been awarded a DFG-funding for 36 months to conduct a research project in the area of Digital Humanities.

The project called  „Corpus Nummorum Thracorum  Klassifizierung der Münztypen und semantische Vernetzung über Nomisma.org“  will use Linked Open Data to create a typology for the coins of the ancient Thrace.

The project  is a cooperation between the Frankfurt Big Data Lab (Dr. Karsten Tolle),  the “Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften” (Prof. Dr. Dr. hc. mult. Martin Grötschel)  and the “Münzkabinett – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin” ( Prof. Dr. Bernhard Weisser).

Dr. Tolle will introduce the project with a talk on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 at 2.30pm at the Frankfurt Big Data Lab.

We are glad to share that Todor Ivanov was invited to teach a two weeks hands-on course on Data Science Tools as part of the new Master in Data Science at the University Perugia, Italy: http://masterds.unipg.it/en/index.html

The two weeks course (20.03.2017- 30.03.2017) was composed of a mix of short lectures and practical hands-on labs in the following topics:

• Introduction to Hadoop and the Hadoop Ecosystem: HDFS, YARN and MapReduce
• Data Movement with Apache Sqoop and Apache Flume
• Managing Data with Impala and Hive
• Data Processing with Spark
• Introduction to Spark MLlib and Spark SQL
• Introduction to NoSQL and MongoDB

http://masterds.unipg.it/en/learn.html

Beim „DB Award Mobilität der Zukunft“ der Deutschen Bahn sollten Studierende Lösungen für das Reisen der Zukunft entwickeln. Patrick Klose und Nicolas Pfeuffer erreichten mit ihrem Projekt „Füllstand Waggon“ den ersten Platz. In ihrer Lösung kann ohne den Einbau weiterer Infrastruktur die exakte Personenzahl in einem Zugwaggon erfasst werden, die Pünktlichkeit der Züge in Zeiten der Rush Hour dadurch erhöht werden. Auf dem zweiten Platz landeten Philipp Lang und Matthias Jostock mit „Heat-Map & Preis-Upgrade“, auf dem dritten Platz Alexander Maas mit „Verspätungshilfen“.

“Durch die Konfrontation mit aktuellen Problemstellungen aus der Praxis konnten wir unser theoretisches Fachwissen um wertvolle Erfahrungen bezüglich der Entwicklung innovativer Lösungen erweitern. Derartige Veranstaltungen sollten unserer Meinung nach in Zukunft häufiger angeboten werden.” – Patrick Klose und Nicolas Pfeuffer

Beim ING-DiBa-Wettbewerb „Future of Financial Data“ ging es darum, Lösungen für Bankkunden suchen, damit diese einen besseren Überblick und eine leichtere Kontrolle über ihre Finanzdaten haben. Jonas De Paolis und Aaron Michel gewannen mit ihrem Projekt „WinTech“ den ersten Preis: In ihrer Lösung wird über die Prognose des zukünftigen Kontostandsverlaufs das szenarienbezogene Denken des Nutzers gefördert. Auf dem zweiten Platz kam das Projekt „Data Driven Detectives“ von Iuliia Guk und Kateryna Pryshchepa, auf den dritten Platz „HelloWeltYa“ von Jiawei Hu und Chuan Liu.

Weitere Informationen: www.bigdata.uni-frankfurt.de/2016/10/deutsche-bahn-und-ing-diba-data-challenges/

Frankfurt— February 23, 2017

We are excited to announce that Dr. Jochen L. Leidner,  currently Research Director at Thomson Reuters in London, will be teaching an introductory course in Data Science for our Master students in Summer Semester 2017.

Dr. Leidner holds Master’s degrees in computational linguistics, English language and literature and computer science from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and in computer speech, text and internet technologies from the University of Cambridge, as well as a Ph.D. in information extraction from the University of Edinburgh (“Toponym resolution in Text”).

He is recipient of the first ACM SIGIR Doctoral Consortium Award, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship in Electronic Markets, and two DAAD scholarships.

His main research interests include information extraction, question answering and search, geo-spatial grounding, applied machine learning with a focus on methodology behind research & development in the area of information access.

The goal of this compact course is to give participants a first gentle introduction and solid conceptual grounding in what has been called ‘data science’, i.e. experimental work that is data-driven and empirical. The focus is on methodology, defining an experimental protocol, devising hypotheses, thinking about measuring success, but also on more practical approaches like basic machine learning methods (both supervised and unsupervised) and natural language processing approaches (like part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition/classification/resolution, and parsing) and the introduction to popular tools. The course also demonstrates some practical applications of the techniques shown, and deepens the students’ skills via practical exercises.

The lecture is delivered over 4 weeks of calendar time and consists of 2 three-day blocks of 3 hours of lectures followed by 2 days of 2.5 hours of exercises/tutorials each). It targets advanced Bachelor’s level and Master’s level students. By the end of the course, participants will be able to analyze data-sets, and to create their own predictive classifieds and visualizations.

Here is the link to the course web page:  http://www.bigdata.uni-frankfurt.de/introduction-data-science/

The Open Letter “Data for Humanity” receives support from over 1,000 signatories worldwide.

Frankfurt/Groningen—February 2, 2017

The open letter “Data for Humanities” – which calls for the use of five ethical principles for the use of data-  has reached more than 1,000 signatories.

The initiative was started by Roberto Zicari (professor at the University of Frankfurt) and Andrej Zwitter ( Professor at the University of Groningen) at the end of 2015, with the goal to bring people and institutions together who share the motivation to use data for the common good.

The letter suggests following five ethical principles when using data:

• Do no harm
• Use data to help create peaceful coexistence
• Use data to help vulnerable people and people in need
• Use data to preserve and improve natural environment
• Use data to help create a fair world without discrimination

Among the most prominent supporters of this open letter are:

Vint Cerf (Google), one of “the fathers of the Internet”;

Philippe Kahn, creator of the camera-phone and CEO of Fullpower;

Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow;

Steve Lohr (New York Times) Pulitzer Price Winner,

Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley;

Michael Hengartner, President, University of Zurich;

Oliver Günther, President, University of Potsdam;

Christopher McKee, Interim Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley;

and four members of the Independent Expert Advisory Group to the United Nations Secretary-General on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG):

Alex Pentland (MIT),

Robert Kirkpatrick (UN Global Pulse),

Enrico Giovannini (University of Rome), and

Nicolas de Cordes (Orange Group).

Prof. Zicari and Prof. Zwitter are now welcoming innovative ideas on how to integrate these principles in all area of our society.

The letter remains open for signatories and can be found here:

http://www.bigdata.uni-frankfurt.de/dataforhumanity/

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Every year the study association (“de Leidsche Flesch”) for Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics and Computer Science students at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, organises a trip to another city for a group of first year students.

The aim of this trip is to acquaint the students with research in other cities and learn something more about their study area. This year, the students were in Frankfurt.

The group of enthusiastic first year Mathematics and Computer Science students visited today the Frankfurt Big Data Lab. They learned and were engaged in a lively discussion about topics such Big Data, Internet of Things, AI, Ethics and the responsibilities we all have when using new technologies with respect to society.

It was fun!

Today, Raik Niemann, PhD student at the Frankfurt Big Data Lab, has successfully defended his PhD thesis!

His research work is related to the research area of Big Data Management Technologies: http://www.bigdata.uni-frankfurt.de/data-management-technologies

Congratulations Raik!

photo: from left to right Prof. Richard Göbel, Raik Niemann, Prof. Roberto V. Zicari, Prof. Udo Kebschull

Today, Sven Rill, PhD student at the Frankfurt Big Data Lab, has successfully defended his PhD thesis!

His research work is related to the Politwi project.  Analyzing tweets for relevant political topics: http://www.bigdata.uni-frankfurt.de/politwi/

Congratulations Sven!

photo: from left to right Prof. Jörg Scheidt, Sven Rill, Prof. Roberto V. Zicari