Beginning of April, the L3S team came together for the first Town Hall Meeting in 2024 to get to know new colleagues and projects. There was also reason to celebrate, as several Best Paper Awards were presented.  

Prof Sören Auer presented his new project “Turning online atomic-scale processing databases into AI-ready tools for development of new sustainable materials and fabrication processes” funded with 150,000 euros for 2 years by Intel and Merck in the AWASES programme. Project partners are the Eindhoven University of Technology (NL) and the University of Warwick (UK). This project aims to AI-enable the Atomic Layer Deposition/Etching (ALD/E) database AtomicLimits.com, implement FAIR principles and neural language model-based knowledge extraction for relevant literature and integrate it into the Open Research Knowledge Graph. 

Simon Gottschalk presented the new project “MoToRes: Mobility and tourism for individual user needs and regional specifics” financed by the mFund of the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) with a term of 32 months. The L3S cooperates with the following partners:  Projektionisten GmbH, Data Science & Intelligent Systems (DSIS), Universität Bonn, Wangerland Touristik GmbH, Connect-Fahrplanauskunft GmbH. The goal is to make travelling easy for everyone. It is designed to help plan individual journey. Data and AI will be used to customise the planning. A lot of data is to be evaluated for the personalisation of the series.  

Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero  presented the last project at the Town Hall Meeting:”ROMEO: RObot-MEdiated Object manipulation with haptic feedback” has a duration of 36 months and is funded by the MWK, zukunft.niedersachsen and Volkswagen Stiftung. Phd student Ziteng Li supervises the project. L3S, Leibniz University Hannover and the Biodemical Robotics Lab are cooperation partners. The project aims at improving the integration of multimodal (kinesthetic and tactile) information for robot-mediated remote manipulation.  

Finally, L3S Director Prof Wolfgang Nejdl awarded the L3S Best Papers of the last months. The award winners are: 

Ildar Baimuratov:
Diagrammatic Reasoning for ALC Visualizations with Logic Graphs     

Danila Valko, Daniel Kudenko:
Reducing CO₂ emissions in a peer-to-peer distributed payment network: Does geography matter in the lightning network?        

Jingge Xiao, Leonie Basso, Wolfgang Nejdl, Niloy Ganguly and Sandipan Sikdar:
IVP-VAE: Modeling EHR Time Series with Initial Value Problem Solvers            

Maryam Badar, Sandipan Sikdar, Wolfgang Nejdl and Marco Fisichella:
FairTrade: Achieving Pareto-Optimal Trade-offs Between Balanced Accuracy and Fairness in Federated Learning            

Sowmya S Sundaram, Sairam Gurajada, Deepak Padmanabhan, Savitha Sam Abraham, Marco Fisichella: Does a language model “understand” high school math? A survey of deep learning based word problem solvers                           

Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero, Sibel Toprak, Josip Josifovski, Lorenzo Jamone:
Visuo-Haptic Object Perception for Robots: An Overview          

Raneen Younis, Abdul Hakmeh, Zahra Ahmadi
MTS2Graph: Interpretable Multivariate Time Series Classification with Temporal Evolving Graphs

Congratulations to all winners!  

Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl presented the certificate to the award winners Ildar Baimurator, Maryam Badar, and Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero at the L3S Townhall Meeting.