VSR News

This year's MuC Conference was a very special event for the VSR team and the other professorships involved from our university, as it was held right here at TU Chemnitz.

When we say "special," we mean both a wonderful and an incredibly demanding experience. While regular attendees enjoyed a 3.5-day conference, our dedicated volunteers worked for five full days, including setup and teardown. For some team members, preparations began months in advance.

As the General Chair, Prof. Martin Gaedke, and as the Local Chair, Dr. Sebastian Heil, led one of Europe's largest HCI conferences. Together with two other professorships from TU Chemnitz, the VSR team succeeded in providing around 500 attendees with a well-planned, highly engaging, and thoroughly successful MuC conference in Chemnitz. We also owe a huge thank you to the many student volunteers who actively helped, including a number of bachelor’s, master's and PhD students from our Web Engineering program.

The feedback we received, both in person and on LinkedIn, was overwhelmingly positive. Not only was the excellent organization praised, but the central theme of "Digital Diversity" and the inspiring workshops and sessions also received high acclaim. And, as one person noted, "Chemnitz is a beautiful place, by the way."

Our team member Maheshika Hansamalee Walpola participated in the 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI 2025) at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen. Organized by the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), CoRDI is Germany’s flagship forum for research data infrastructures. Under the theme “RDM in Action”, the event brought together many participants from NFDI consortia, research initiatives, and international partners to exchange ideas on research data management and FAIR data practices.

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.

The second exam review for the exams written in the winter semester 2024/2025 will again be held in presence. Please note that we do not disclose sample solutions during the exam review.

The appointment will take place in presence on May 20 2025 from 13:30-15:00. You can freely choose, when you want to come in for the review, although you can do so only once. Please consider that each review per exam takes probably about 10 minutes. Thus, arriving later than 10 minutes to the end you might have no chance to review anymore. This adds up accordingly if you want to review more than one exam.

The exam review will take place in the FRIZ computer pool A11.201 (old: 1/B201). Please bring your student ID and wait at the door as you will be let in one by one. More information on the process of the presence exam review can be found in the edu FAQ. If you have further questions after reading the FAQ, you can send your question by mail to us via vsr-edu@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de.