VSR News - feature

On Monday, our team member Sebastian Heil co-organized the International Workshop on Secure, Trustworthy, and Robust AI (STRAI) at the 20th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES2025) in Ghent. The workshop was part of the TrustworthyAI pillar in ENFIELD – AI Network of Excellence and attracted submissions from both Cybersecurity and Safety research. Sebastian had the opportunity to chair the workshop session together with Prof. Georgios Spathoulas and to exchange ideas with many enthusiastic PhD students at the beginning of their research journey, as well as with highly experienced senior researchers. The lively discussions underlined the importance of building AI systems that are not only powerful but also secure, robust, and trustworthy. The STRAI workshop highlighted the growing community around Trustworthy AI within ENFIELD, fostering collaboration across disciplines and institutions.

Last week, our team member Sebastian Heil helped organize the ENFIELD AI Summer School hosted by Prof. Geza Nemeth in Budapest at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He was Program Co-Chair together with Prof. Adina Magda Florea and invited speaker in the Trustworthy AI sessions. In his talk, he introduced the concept of Trustworthy AI, highlighting the fundamentals of trust and trustworthiness, with a particular focus on the seven key requirements outlined by the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI. He also presented methods and tools for building trustworthy AI systems, such as Explainable AI techniques and model cards, and offered insights into three current research directions pursued within the ENFIELD – AI Network of Excellence. Participants engaged hands-on session assessing the trustworthiness of their own AI systems. The ENFIELD Summer School brought together students and speakers from diverse backgrounds to explore AI from multiple disciplinary and industrial perspectives. VSR will organize the next ENFIELD AI Summer School in 2026, so for more information please visit the ENFIELD Website and social media channels.

We are very happy to welcome Sandra Schaftner to the VSR group as a researcher contributing to the Across project.

We look forward to the valuable contributions she will make and will fully support her research as she embarks on this new chapter.

We are very happy to welcome Lucas Schröder to the VSR group as a researcher contributing to the Come2Data project.

We look forward to the valuable contributions he will make and will fully support his research as he embarks on this new chapter.

Our Team presented multiple publications at the International Conference of Web Engineering 2025 (ICWE 2025) which took place in the Netherlands (Delft) from the 30th of June to the 3rd of July. Our Team member Dr. Sebastian Heil was invited to give a keynote speech during the PhD Symposium in which he provided valueable insights about the journey of early career researchers on their way to becoming PhDs. Additionally, he presented his publication UIQLab: Automatic Web User Interface Assessment. Jan Haas presented his PhD topic titled ResearchFlow: An End-User Development Approach to Research Data Management Workflow Composition. Tobias Muench shared his vision regarding the moral web through his publication MoralWeb: Reimagining the Web with Solid, Low-Code Tools, and Moral Codes for an Democratic and Equitable Future. Christoph Goepfert introduced his publication ShEx2SPARQL: Translating Shape Expressions into SPARQL Queries.

We were pleased to host Leonardo Germán Loza Bonora from LIFIA Faculty of Informatics, National University of La Plata, for a research visit in our group. His work focuses on the early detection of user profiles from web interaction events, combining user behavior analysis with semantic modeling and AI techniques.

During his stay, Leonardo collaborated closely with our team on profiling and personalization approaches in Web Engineering, contributing his expertise in behavioral analytics and intelligent systems. The visit fostered valuable knowledge exchange and laid the foundation for future collaboration.

Our team member Christoph Göpfert presented his latest research at the Natural Scientific Language Processing and Research Knowledge Graphs (NSLP 2025) workshop, held in conjunction with ESWC 2025 in Portorož, Slovenia.

The presented paper, titled "Facilitating RDF Querying in Research Data Management through ShEx-Based SPARQL Query Construction", explores an approach to simplifying RDF querying within research data infrastructures.

We are happy to announce that our colleague Maik Benndorf successfully defended his PhD thesis "Towards Vibration-based Structural Health Monitoring using Mobile Android Devices" on 15 April 2025.

We congratulate Maik to his achievement and wish him the best for his future career.

We are happy to announce that our colleague Mahda Noura successfully defended her PhD thesis "Goal-Oriented End User Development of Web of Things Compositions" on 16 January 2025.

We congratulate Mahda to her achievement and wish her the best for her future career.

We are happy to announce that we will help building the eCampus of ACROSS, the European Cross-border University, an alliance of TUC with 9 other European universities.

TUC as lead, represented by Prof. Martin Gaedke, and UNIUD as co-lead, represented by Prof. Christian Micheloni, will lead Task 2.1. This task focuses on building and integrating the digital infrastructure of ACROSS. The activities are supported by Dr. Daniel Pietschmann and Dr. Stefano Bonomi..