The Web Information Systems (WIS) group focuses on research & education in data-based information systems on the Web and making them more effective in retrieving, processing and interpreting data generated by humans and machines. The overall mission of the WIS research group is:
- to develop a deep understanding of the construction and use of web-based information systems,
- to develop novel methods, techniques, and tools that advance the way in which web-based information systems are constructed and used, and
- to offer students education that prepares them for a leading role in web-based information systems science and technology.
Latest news
- On June 27, 2024, Nirmal Roy successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Exploring the Effects of Interactive Interfaces on User Search Behaviour.
- On May 22, 2024, Arthur Barbosa Câmara successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Designing Search-as-Learning Systems.
- On April 8, 2024, Peide Zhu successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Towards Robust Automatic Question Generation For Learning.
- On December 13, 2023, Tim Draws successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Understanding Viewpoint Biases in Web Search Results.
- On October 4, 2023, Agathe Balayn successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled On Developer's Practices for Hazard Diagnosis in Machine Learning Systems.
- On May 24, 2023, Gustavo Penha successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Designing and Diagnosing Models for Conversational Search and Recommendation.
- The first generation of experts on Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Europe is about to arise as the NL4XAI research project comes to an end. Funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme to train eleven PhD candidates, this European consortium announces its final conference and industrial event on 24 May 2024 at the DesignLab of the University of Twente, The Netherlands (Shaping the Future of AI – NL4XAI – Interactive Natural Language Technology for Explainable Artificial Intelligence). This event is meant as a platform to share the groundbreaking results achieved by the PhD candidates in NLP and XAI, and catalyze dynamic discussions.
- Scientists and companies meet again to ‘teach’ AI how to explain itself -- A new event organised in the framework of the H2020 European research project NL4XAI next December, will focus on the issue of how the quality of algorithms in this area should be assessed in the emerging field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI).
- The third edition of The Academic Fringe Festival on the theme of "Designing at Scale with Human-AI Collaboration" will begin on March 7, 2022 and run through till June, 2022.
- Three full papers from WIS Delft members have been accepted at the premier HCI conference ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2022!
- Three full papers from WIS Delft members have been accepted at the premier ACM Web Conference, WWW 2022!
- The members of the Responsible Data Science track of the Digital Society research program published a roadmap on responsible use of data and algorithms.
- We are happy to have WIS members involved into the organisation of DBML Workshop. More information can be found on the office webpage of the workshop.
- We are organizing this year's Dutch Belgian Database Day (DBDBD21) in Delft. More information can be found in the official event page.
- We are looking for a new colleague in NLP to join us at the Web Information Systems group. See details here.
- Amazon Science Best Paper Award at AAAI HCOMP 2021. The paper presents a checklist to combat cognitive biases in crowdsourcing.
- Best paper award in ACM DEBS. The paper deals with transactions on stateful functions in the Cloud.
- We are honoured and happy that our group is part of (the) two consortia invited by NWO to work out a 10-year Long Term Programme. We are with our knowledge management and human computing expertises part of ROBUST for trusthworthy AI and of Plant-XR.
- Valentine, an open source tool and benchmarking suite on matching techniques for dataset discovery will be presented in ICDE'21 and demoed in VLDB'21.
- WIS Delft will be very well represented at the premier Human Computation and Crowdsourcing conference, AAAI HCOMP 2021. We have 3 full research papers and 3 demo papers accepted!
- Douglas Engelbert Best Paper Award at ACM HT 2021. The paper explores the obfuscation and labeling of search results to mitigate confirmation bias on the web.
Focus
In the Web Information Systems research group, we aim at making web information systems more effective in retrieving, processing and interpreting data generated by humans and machines.
Objectives
- To understand what human‐ and machine-generated web data represents in terms of people's actions, interests, intents, and behaviors on the web.
- To develop new solutions to meet the fundamental challenges in how systems effectively attribute and exploit semantics for human‐ and machine-generated data, given the size and dynamic nature of the web.
Approach
Our approach towards our objectives of understanding and developing, combines four main research areas:- Data Management
- Human Computing & Human-Centered AI
- Information Retrieval
- User Modeling & Learning Analytics
Disciplines
As WIS researchers, together with our students, we strive to advance the state-of-the-art in relevant disciplines like user modeling, Web science, information retrieval, natural language processing, database systems, Web engineering, Web data management, user interaction, human computing, and human-AI interaction. We contribute to and impact these scientific disciplines by publishing in the top venues in these fields and by actively serving in the organization and program committees of relevant conferences and in editorial boards of relevant journals.