Home of Data - Databases and Information Systems

We are a subdivision of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck.

 

Our passion lies in developing innovative methods for efficient data storage and analyses aiming to assist users and businesses to meet their information needs.

 

 

News

DBIS at MediaEval 2019

This week, Max is at MediaEval 2019 in Nice, France. MediaEval is a workshop consisting of various challenges in the area of multimedia information retrieval. Together with our partners from Academia Sinica and Taiwan AI Labs, DBIS co-authored two papers on the Emotion and Theme Recognition in Music Using Jamendo task. Max will present one of those papers (Recognizing Song Mood and Theme Using Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks) on Tuesday.

Günther Specht featured in Standort

Günther Specht is featured in the Standort magazine, where he discusses Building Information Management (BIM) and particularly, our freeBIM project.

DBIS@CLEF 2019

This week, Benjamin and Eva are in Lugano for the CLEF conference (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, a central conference on evaluating information retrieval tasks) to present their works. Benjamin will present his full paper entitled "Generating Cross-Domain Text Corpora from Social Media Comments" at the main conference on Wednesday. Eva was task chair for the Style Change Detection task of the PAN@CLEF Challenge 2019 and will present the task and the participant's results as part of the PAN lab (Overview of the Style Change Detection Task at PAN 2019, Overview of PAN 2019: Bots and Gender Profiling, Celebrity Profiling, Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution and Style Change Detection). 

New Bachelor and Master Thesis Topics Available

We are happy to announce that new topics for Bachelor and Master theses are available now. They cover the whole spectrum of our research. You can choose from music, natural language and database related topics.

Take a look at our theses page for further details.

Paper Acceptance

Hooray - DBIS got three papers accepted at major conferences last week:

  • Generating Cross-Domain Text Corpora from Social Media Comments (Benjamin Murauer, Günther Specht) got accepted at the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2019)
  • Hit Song Prediction: Leveraging Low- and High-Level Audio Features (Eva Zangerle, Ramona Huber, Michael Vötter, Yi-Hsuan Yang) got accepted at the 20th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2019)
  • Article Quality Classification on Wikipedia: Introducing Document Embeddings and Content Features (Eva Zangerle, Manuel Schmidt) got accepted at the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2019)

ASI-PropertyServer is now Open Source

As a result of years of cooperation between the Austrian Standards International Working Group 011.09 "Technical Drawing and Documentation in Building Construction" and the research project freeBIM, which has been supported for years by the Economic Development Department of the state of Tyrol and the FFG, the ASI-PropertyServer is now Open Source and hence freely available to all interested parties, developers and companies. The already free and unlimited use of the ASI-PropertyServer for the Austrian BIM standard A 6241-2 has thus been expanded to include the option to install it locally, to supplement own special libraries and to cooperate in further development. It can be found at https://github.com/asi-propertyserver and is coordinated by the University of Innsbruck, Department of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS) under Univ. Prof. Dr. Günther Specht. 

The Economic Development Department of the state of Tyrol has recently confirmed that it will continue to support the further development of the project "freeBIM.connect" at the University of Innsbruck together with Tyrolean IT and industrial companies for the next two years.
 

ÖAW scholarship!

We are proud to announce that Benjamin's proposal for a DOC scholarship by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften has been accepted! This ensures that he can finish his PhD while remaining to do research in and for the department. Starting from July, the scholarship will provide financial support for two years.

StyleExplorer at ECIR 2019

This week, Michael is presenting our StyleExplorer tool at the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2019) in Cologne, Germany. StyleExplorer was developed by Thibault Gerrier as part of his Bachelor thesis and provides an online toolkit to analyze, visualize and compare arbitrary text documents. During the course of the ECIR conference, many participants expressed their interests and are looking forward to using it for their own research problems.

Kick-Off for GoStudent Project

In cooperation with the GoStudent platform and funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), we just kicked off a new project. GoStudent provides an interactive learning platform that raises e-learning to a new level. Thousands of students are supported by a large community of validated tutors available over chat or via video sessions to answer student questions. Since the launch of GoStudent, answers were given to more than 500.000 questions. 

The goal of this project is to reuse this knowledge in self-learning Question Answering Systems (QAS) to instantly satisfy students' curiosity. The main problems we aim to tackle are the automatic recognition of similar questions and the extraction of possible answers given in a conversation. Via methodologies such as Deep- and Machine-Learning, the boundaries of a standard bot will be excelled to raise user satisfaction. 

BTW Conference 2019

The DBIS group has been busy at the BTW conference (Database systems for Business, Technology and Web) in Rostock in March 2019. Johannes Kessler and Günther Specht presented and demoed our RelaX tool. Furthermore, Günther Specht participated in the Workshop for "Digitale Lehre im Fach Datenbanken", where he also showcased the RelaX tool. RelaX provides an open-source calculator for relational algebra, particularly aiming at support students and teachers for databases courses. You can find out more about RelaX in the demo paper and the GitHub repo of RelaX.

 

 

DBIS wins best master thesis award

We proudly announce that Stefan Wurzinger won this year's best master thesis award at the Inday Students.

In his thesis, he analyzed the characteristics of Spotify Playlists based on lyrical and content-based features. Previously, his thorough research already resulted in a publication of his work at the ECIR 2018.

Congratulations Stefan!

ISMIR 2018

This week, Eva is presenting her and Martin's paper "Content-based User Models: Modeling the Many Faces of Musical Preferences" at the 19th International Society of Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) in Paris. This year, Eva is also co-chair for the Women in Music Information Retrieval activities at ISMIR (together with Audrey Laplante from the University of Montreal, Canada).

DBIS@CLEF in Avignon, France

As a co-organizer of the annual PAN workshop Michael attended the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) last week in Avignon, France. The style change detection task, organized by DBIS, had six successful submissions with very promising results, which were presented at the conference. Also in 2018, PAN could again top the number of registrations (227) and the number of active participants(41), making it one of the mostly active tasks at CLEF in general. Looking forward to next year!

CONFERENCE ON Content-based Multimedia Indexing

This week, Eva will be presenting Martin and her work on multi-context music recommendation at the International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing in La Rochelle, France. We are particularly proud to say that our paper has received the Best Student Paper Award :)