Forum 4.0: New Project Funded by Ahoi.Digital

3 November 2017, by David Mosteller

Photo: Creator

We are happy to announce that our project proposal Forum 4.0  just got positively evaluated and received a 625,000 Euro funding from the informatics platform ahoi.digital. With ahoi.digital, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Hamburg, the HAW, the Technical University of Hamburg (TUHH) and the HafenCity University are intensifying their cooperation in education, research, and technology transfer. An expert commission selected Forum 4.0 among the four accepted project application (15 in total).

Forum 4.0 starts on the 1st January 2018 and focuses on the systematic content analysis, aggregation, and visualization of user comments. This project builds on previous work with social scientists and strives for an informatics centered and interdisciplinary research partnership.

This project involves five research teams of three different institutions:

Universität Hamburg

• Applied Software Technology (Prof. Maalej)
• Language Technology Group (Prof. Biemann)

HAW Informatik

• Technik und Informatik (Prof. Zukunft)
• Fakultät Design, Medien und Information (Prof. Stöcker) (associated)

Hans-Bredow-Institut

• Journalism Research (PD Dr. Loosen) (associated)

Summary of the project:

Online user comments, such as journalistic content or product features are associated with low quality, Hate speech or even excessive demands for moderation. Forum 4.0 will develop new methods based on text analysis, machine learning (with Human in the Loop) and Empirical Software Engineering to better exploit the constructive and deliberative potential of user comments. The aim is to systematically analyze, aggregate and visualize the content and quality of comments at runtime in order to enable constructive participation. The project builds on our previous work with social scientists and aims for an informatics-centered, interdisciplinary research network that combines the focal points "Information Governance Technologies" and "Data Science" of ahoi.digital. We foresee immense transfer potential for the media location of Hamburg.