SummerSchool2025/Speaker

Speaker Summer School 2025

Professor Sören Auer, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library

Sören Auer is Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB. He has made important contributions to semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems. He is the author (resp. co-author) of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has received several awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, a SWSA ten-year award, the ESWC 7-year Best Paper Award, and the OpenCourseware Innovation Award. He is co-founder of high potential research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the Open Research Knowledge Graph ORKG.org and the innovative technology start-up eccenca.com.
Homepage: https://tib.eu/auer

Keynote: Neuro-symbolic AI for Open Science

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Dr Dilek Fraisl, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Dr Dilek Fraisl is a Senior Research Scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). She also serves as the Managing Director of the Citizen Science Global Partnership. She holds a PhD in Sustainability Transitions, with research interests spanning sustainable development, data and statistics, Earth Observation, and citizen science as theory, practice, and evidence-base for policy development. She has worked in the areas of data governance and data management, including research on citizen science data quality. Dilek has led and contributed to various citizen science projects focused on marine litter, land use land cover, and other critical environmental issues, funded by the European Commission, UN agencies, and other global donors. Additionally, she has contributed to key UN reports, such as “Measuring Progress: Environment and the SDGs” by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Dilek has several board and expert group memberships with scientific communities, the UN, and other global initiatives, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Resilience Frontiers, the UN Statistics Division (UNSD) Citizen Data Expert Group and Collaborative, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) Science Policy Business Forum, UN- Habitat Quality of Life Program, and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), among others. She is also actively involved in organizing committees and scientific advisory boards for several European and global conferences, such as the UN World Data Forum.

In-depths lecture: Collaborative Power of AI and Citizen Science for Sustainable Development

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Dr Katrin Frisch, Ombuds Committee for Research Integrity in Germany

Dr Katrin Frisch has been working as a researcher at the Ombuds Committee for Research Integrity in Germany since May 2020, specifically at the project "Discussion Hubs to Foster Research Integrity", with a focus on research data and, since 2023, artificial intelligence. Between March 2023 and March 2024, she also worked as a research integrity advisor at the OWID office. The aim of the Discussion Hubs project is to create practical guidelines supplementary to the DFG Code of Conduct "Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice" as well as producing novel research on research integrity. Recent publications include the FAQ Artificial Intelligence and Research Integrity, a study on authorship and data use conflicts as well as a monograph on fairness in science (both only available in German). You can find an overview of the project and related output here.

Keynote: Maintaining Integrity when Using AI in Your Research

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Dr Angela Holzer, German Research Foundation

Dr Angela Holzer is a Programme Director at the German Research Foundation. She leads a team that is responsible for the funding of Scholarly Publications as well as the strategy on Open Access and Open Science.

Keynote: Is Open Science still relevant?

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Dr Dietmar Kammerer, Weizenbaum Institute

Dr Dietmar Kammerer joined the Weizenbaum Institute in November 2022 as a research data officer. He is responsible for the development and operation of the Open Acces Repository "Weizenbaum Library" as well as for all aspects of reserach data management.

Dietmar studied Literature, Politics and Philosophy in Konstanz, England and Berlin. He received his doctorate in 2008 at the Department of Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt University of Berlin with a dissertation on images of video surveillance. From 2011, he worked as a research associate at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Marburg with a special focus on film theory and media history. He developed and operated the Open Access Repository for Media Studies and has served as technical and administrative project coordinator in the National Research Data Infrastructure.

His research interests include surveillance, privacy, data protection, Open Science, film and media theory.

https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/portrait/p/dietmar-kammerer/

Professor Elena Simperl, King’s College London

Elena Simperl is a professor of computer science at King’s College London in the United Kingdom. She is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of Royal Society of Arts, as well as a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow.

She has a doctoral degree in computer science (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Free University of Berlin and a diploma in computer science (Dipl. Inform.) from the Technical University of Munich. Before joining King’s in 2020, she held positions at Southampton, as well as in Germany and Austria. http://elenasimperl.eu

Keynote: Open data infrastructure in the age of generative AI

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Abstract: Open data infrastructure refers to the systems, frameworks, and processes put in place to collect, store, manage, and share data generated or held by government, science, and other public institutions. It is meant to ensure that public data is accessible, high-quality, secure, and usable by a wide range of stakeholders, including the public.

For more than a decade, we have witnessed millions of datasets made available via such infrastructure, advancing research, policymaking, and innovation. However, open data infrastructure is still far from realising its potential; non-technical users face significant barriers in navigating complex datasets and extracting meaningful information to support their decisions.

Furthermore, the global AI race has put substantial strains on this infrastructure, with data holders forced to re-examine their ability to sustain critical public services.

In this talk I will walk through some of my recent research into addressing these challenges. I will start with a series of user studies, which explore how professionals in various data-related roles engage with chatbots to find, make sense, and use open data.

Diving deeper to the accuracy issues suggested by these studies, I will then describe two experiments, which use machine unlearning and information leakage methods to understand if existing public authoritative sources of data are used by widely accessible generative AI tools.

Informed by the findings, my team developed PortalGPT, a series of AI prototypes leveraging knowledge graphs, large language models, and retrieval-augmented generation to make open data more accessible and actionable for people with varying levels of data literacy.

PortalGPT enhances dataset discovery by bridging the gap between user information needs and structured data queries and enables dataset exploration through interactive analysis tools. Through conversational natural language interactions, users can seamlessly search, analyse, and explore knowledge from open data portals, redefining the traditional methods of navigating and utilizing open datasets.