We would like to cordially invite you to our 8th European COST Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Finance – Sept 29, 2023, online and at Bern Business School.
This year, the event will be joint with our Annual Meeting for the COST Action on Fintech and Artificial Intelligence in Finance as well as the European Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Industrial Doctoral Network on Digital Finance. We will welcome participants from more than 20 European countries in Bern.
We would like to invite you to the GEOSummit open innovation workshop on “Open Data Value Creation”, hosted by ERNI in Zurich.
Creating value based on open data is difficult, as topics such as harmonization of data formats, automatic data lineages or the standardization of data linkage processes are technically challenging and also not unproblematic from a regulatory point of view. But even supposedly simpler steps such as contextualized data search and raising awareness of the availability of open data in general have only been implemented to a very limited extent.
In this workshop, we would like to invite stakeholders from research, industry, NGOs and the public sector to work on solutions and to define concrete steps on how to improve value creation through open data. Dr. Jürg Meierhofer (ZHAW) will be our moderator and guarantees a result-oriented, structured approach to the workshop.
As thematic use-case we will focus on the energy sector. This includes, for example, the analysis of consumption data collected by sensors and smart meters – or, more generally, exploiting the potential of energy management systems due to the increasing electrification. Especially with regard to energy savings (e.g. usage-specific lighting scenarios), these so-called IoT recommender systems have the potential to deliver great added value. These areas are not detached from the building shell, which brings us back to the various smart building & construction technologies and of course to the electricity providers (e.g. with regard to dynamic tariffs). in this context, we discuss topics such as data protection, data infrastructure and data management, open platform ideas for data sharing and trading and the smart services that could be built on them.
Free participation, but registration is necessary: Link
Wir möchten Sie zum GEOSummit Open Innovation Workshop “Open Data Value Creation” einladen, der von ERNI in Zürich veranstaltet wird.
Die Wertschöpfung auf der Basis offener Daten ist schwierig, denn Themen wie die Harmonisierung von Datenformaten, automatische Datenabgleiche oder die Standardisierung von Datenverknüpfungsprozessen sind technisch anspruchsvoll und auch aus regulatorischer Sicht nicht unproblematisch. Aber auch vermeintlich einfachere Schritte wie die kontextualisierte Datensuche und die Sensibilisierung für die Verfügbarkeit offener Daten im Allgemeinen wurden bisher nur in sehr geringem Umfang umgesetzt.
In diesem Workshop möchten wir Akteure aus Forschung, Industrie, Nichtregierungsorganisationen und dem öffentlichen Sektor einladen, an Lösungen zu arbeiten und konkrete Schritte zu definieren, wie die Wertschöpfung durch offene Daten verbessert werden kann. Dr. Jürg Meierhofer (ZHAW) ist unser Moderator und garantiert einen ergebnisorientierten, strukturierten Ansatz für den Workshop.
Als ein mögliches Anwendungsgebiet steht hierbei der Energiesektor im Fokus. Dazu gehört z.B. die Analyse von Verbrauchsdaten, die durch Sensoren und Smart Meter gesammelt werden – oder ganz allgemein die Nutzung des Potenzials von Energiemanagementsystemen aufgrund der zunehmenden Elektrifizierung. Gerade im Hinblick auf Energieeinsparungen (z.B. nutzungsspezifische Beleuchtungsszenarien) haben diese sogenannten IoT-Recommender-Systeme das Potenzial, einen großen Mehrwert zu liefern. Diese Bereiche sind nicht losgelöst von der Gebäudehülle, womit wir wieder bei den verschiedenen intelligenten Gebäude- und Bautechnologien und natürlich bei den Stromanbietenden Organisationen sind (z. B. im Hinblick auf dynamische Tarife) sind. In diesem Zusammenhang diskutieren wir Themen wie Datenschutz, Dateninfrastruktur und Datenmanagement, Ideen für offene Plattformen zum Datenaustausch und -handel und mögliche, darauf aufbauende “intelligente” Dienste.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the onboarding process has emerged as a crucial aspect of organizational success. With the advent of remote work and virtual teams, new challenges have arisen, necessitating the development of structured onboarding processes that incorporate digital tools. However, the integration of analog and digital tools to effectively assimilate new hires remains a persistent challenge for organizations.
Effective onboarding of new hires has long been recognized as a critical factor in organizational success. It ensures a smooth transition for new employees and facilitates their assimilation into the organizational culture and workflow. However, with the paradigm shift towards remote work and virtual teams, the traditional onboarding process has encountered new hurdles, necessitating the adoption of novel strategies and digital tools. New work arrangements offer flexibility and access to talent pools beyond geographical boundaries. However, they also present unique challenges in terms of team collaboration, communication, and fostering a sense of belonging. Addressing these challenges requires a reimagining of the onboarding process.
Leveraging digital technologies for employee onboarding creates complexities that differ from traditional in-person onboarding. The absence of physical presence makes it challenging to establish personal connections (commitment and organizational citizenship behaviour) and convey the organizational culture effectively. The challenges posed by the combination of analog and digital tools necessitate innovative strategies. By implementing a structured onboarding process that incorporates digital tools effectively, organizations can foster a sense of connection, enhance employee engagement, and lay the foundation for long-term success in a digital-first era.
A research Team of the BFH aims to develop a toolbox of digital solutions in order to empower SMEs to effectively integrate new hires. Through empirical research and a focus on specific SME needs, this study seeks to enhance the onboarding experience and promote organizational success.
We are inviting companies interested in participating in a shaping workshop to share their knowledge and insights regarding the use of digital tools in the onboarding processes. This workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss the challenges they face and generate initial ideas on how to effectively address these challenges. We encourage companies to join us in this collaborative session to foster knowledge sharing and collectively enhance the onboarding experience.
The workshop will take place on 02.10.2023 from 16.30 – 18.00 at Haslerstrasse 30, 3008 Bern followed by an Apèro.
The language of the workshop will be chosen depending on the number of registered participants (German/English).
Registration is requested by 18.09.2023 to Sabrina.Schell@bfh.ch
Our next Expert Meeting on Monday, 21 August 2023, 17:00-18:30, will focus on various aspects and applications of Large Language Models.
It will take place at the ZHAW premises in Lagerstrasse 45, 8004 Zurich in room ZL O3.01 on the third floor. The meeting will be followed by an apéro. Online participation is also possible.
We will then send you a calendar invitation which includes online participation details.
The following presentations are confirmed for the meeting:
Kim Engels, Converto AG – Large Language Models for Cross-Media Marketing
In this talk, Kim briefly presents some examples of how he and his team at Converto use AI and LLM to improve or speed up their projects.
Besides approaches such as text generation for newsletters, there are also variants such as code generation within the team as well as the use of self-developed solutions to create 3D models for customer campaigns.
Florian Tramér, ETH – Are Aligned Neural Networks Adversarially Aligned?
Large language models are now tuned to align with the goals of their creators, namely to be “helpful and harmless.” These models should respond helpfully to user questions, but refuse to answer requests that could cause harm. However, adversarial users can construct inputs which circumvent attempts at alignment. In this talk, we’ll discuss to what extent these models remain aligned, even when interacting with an adversarial user who constructs worst-case inputs (adversarial examples). We’ll see that existing optimization attacks are insufficiently powerful to reliably attack aligned text models, except when these models are multimodal (i.e., they can process both text and images). In that case, we show these models can be easily attacked, i.e., induced to perform arbitrary un-aligned behavior through adversarial perturbation of the input image.
Alex Paramythis, Contexity AG – Adapting Large Language Models for Customer Request Handling
With the rise of Generative Large Language Models (LLM), companies are looking into the many opportunities proffered by this new technology. One area of particular interest is the automated handling of customer requests (e.g., received through email, chat, social media, etc.) using the institutional knowledge at hand. In such a context, LLMs may need to be trained on, or have access to, privileged, non-public information in the company’s knowledge base. This, in turn, entails that the models need to be prepared within, and served from, a company’s own infrastructure to prevent information leakage — a requirement that points in the direction of commercially friendly open-source models. In this talk we will present our work on generation of responses to customer requests using the IGEL (a BLOOM based model), FLAN-UL2, and Falcon LLMs. For the first two models we will also report on our attempts to fine-tune the models before use, with a variety of training data.
SwissText is an annual conference that brings together text analytics experts from industry and academia. It is organized by the Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing (SwissNLP) in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland (HES-SO // HE-Arc) as well as the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the data innovation alliance.
Industrie 4.0 ermöglicht es Unternehmen, ihre Prozesse transparenter zu gestalten und die Integration von internen und externen Partnern neu zu gestalten. Je nach Grad der Partnerintegration können sogar ganze Ökosysteme, bestehend aus Lieferanten, Kunden, Konkurrenten und Substitutionsunternehmen, etabliert werden.
Die Konferenz Perspektiven mit Industrie 4.0 bietet einen Einblick in unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten der Ökosystemgestaltung. Die Inhalte der Konferenz umfassen unterschiedlichen Lösungsansätze (“best practices” aus Unternehmen) zu folgenden Fragen:
Wie kann die Transparenz in Supply Chains dank Industrie 4.0 erhöht werden (traceability)?
Wie können dank Industrie 4.0 neue Geschäftsmodelle mit stärkerer Kundenintegration gestaltet werden?
Wie können ganze Partnernetzwerke in Ökosysteme überführt und somit neuartige Ressourcen und Kompetenzen erschlossen werden?
An der Konferenz Perspektiven mit Industrie 4.0 werden Lösungen von und für Schweizer KMU präsentiert, die pionierhaft und mustergültig sind. Wir laden Sie ein, sich davon inspirieren zu lassen und freuen uns über Ihre Teilnahme.
The volatility we have experienced recently was unexpected, and society needed to be sufficiently prepared. Unforeseen resource shortages, logistics and skilled people have further challenged our society. We see today that the markets are driven by the scarcity of resources rather than demand. Coupled with this is the need to integrate sustainability into our behaviour. All of this results in a wave of short-term and rushed management decisions that are not sustainable in the medium- and long-term and, in many cases, create unforeseen consequences that, on an individual basis, make sense yet, on a systemic basis, make the situation worse.
It became evident that we need to be more resilient and able to deal with the changes our rapidly changing world throws at us. Resilience can be achieved by rapidly adapting to a dramatically changed situation (through resourcefulness, adaptability, and flexibility) (Conz & Magnani, 2020). Capacity increases can achieve this by improving the system’s ability to absorb shocks (e.g., by more redundancy, robustness, or agility). Smart services can provide the capability to adapt within ecosystems. By their inherent design of resource integration in socio-technical systems (Vargo et al., 2018), services systems build up the dynamic capabilities to rearrange existing resources for adapting to dynamically changing needs.
The smart services summit 2023 will be dedicated to the capability of smart service systems to support resilience and build sustainability. Contributions are welcome in the following fields:
How can smart services create value in dynamic ecosystems?
How can dynamic capabilities be developed?
How are resilience and sustainability in smart service systems interrelated?
How can resilience and short-term value optimisation go hand in hand?
What are practical examples and best practice experiences from companies?
What role does AI play in building resilience and helping with sustainability?
Contributions are invited both from practitioners and scholars. We prefer emerging work that will create discussions; the studies could be based on cases and theoretical frameworks. Accepted papers will be published in Springer proceedings as 12-page papers.
The construction industry has been undergoing a digital transformation, with data science playing an increasingly important role in improving efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing safety. However, to fully realize its potential, it’s essential to promote open innovation and collaboration between data scientists and construction experts.
For this purpose, the first open innovation workshop on “Construction & Data Science” was recently held in Zurich, Switzerland, bringing together 40 participants from both fields to explore the intersection of construction and data science.
Findings
To improve cooperation between the construction industry and data science, the workshop formulated central key findings:
Focus on creating structured data sets across projects, teams, and companies and move away from managing data in CAD systems.
Don’t wait for new standards to be defined, learn to combine information from different sources and standards by mapping it.
Consider using other ways of pulling data from CAD tools, like Speckle or an IFC-based modeling tool like Blender.
Engage in open source or open data projects and learn from others, especially in rapidly evolving technology.
Check out sites like www.opensource.construction/ to proactively work towards changing the status quo and improving the industry.
The summary is also nicely put together in the Linkedin post by opensource.construction’s President, Maximilian Vomhof.
The Event The workshop aimed to identify potential problems and solutions in this area and to promote open innovation and collaboration between data scientists and construction experts. In this blog post, you will find a report on the insights gained from the workshop and highlight the importance of open innovation in these industries.
The workshop was organized jointly by opensource.construction, bauen digital Schweiz, and the data innovation alliance at Amstein + Walthert in Oerlikon. After a short introduction to the Databooster program, the passive part for the participants was over!
The workshop was structured according to the double diamond framework from design thinking, which consists of four stages: discover, define, develop, and deliver. After the four groups got to know each other, they explored the problem space at the intersection of construction and data science or data engineering. In this phase, the focus was on generating a wide range of ideas and potential solutions by asking “why” questions and understanding the workings of the construction industry as a data scientist – essentially, “falling in love” with the problem.
At this workshop, “love” was certainly in the air, with many questions generated. Of these, five problems were identified as most relevant:
Optimized building scans
Open-source door planning configurator
Linked product data
GIS data linked with building laws
Open data environment for storing and linking element-independent information
In the second part of the workshop, powerful teams were formed around the ideas generated. They not only focused on potential solutions but also on related business cases, which added a practical, pragmatic dimension to the ideation process.
One of the solutions produced was standardization, particularly in the light of data formats. However, it was agreed that establishing standards and achieving consensus could take a long time – a luxury that the construction industry simply doesn’t have. It was essential to identify quick and effective solutions that could be implemented without major delay.
Despite the apero long being ready, the teams were still deeply engaged in finding innovative solutions that could be launched swiftly. The teams agreed to follow up on their ideas and continue pushing for change, possibly using the Innovation Booster Databooster, something we are particularly happy to hear.
In conclusion, we believe that the Innovation Booster Databooster initiative is a valuable resource for teams to develop and implement their solutions generated using the double diamond design thinking structure. We look forward to seeing how these ideas will shape the future of construction and data science!
This Expert Meeting will take place at the ZHAW premises in Lagerstrasse 45, 8004 Zurich in room ZL O3.01 on the third floor (online participation is also possible for those who prefer this option) on Wednesday, May 10 from 17:30-19:00. After the meeting, there will be an apéro so that you can carry on your discussions and get to know each other.
We have the following three talks confirmed:
End-to-end ASR for Swiss German at Microsoft: A Transducer Approach Oscar Koller, Applied Scientist at Microsoft
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Swiss German is a challenging task due to the lack of a standardized writing system and the high regional variability of the dialects. In this talk, we present our work on developing end-to-end ASR models for Swiss German at Microsoft using transducer architectures. We show that transducers outperform hybrid models by over 20% in word error rate on a multi-dialectal corpus of Swiss German speech. We also compare our models to Whisper, a state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence model for low-resource ASR, and find that transducer models achieve comparable results with much smaller model size and training time. Finally, we discuss how end-to-end models produce transliterations of Swiss German words instead of standard German translations affecting the readability and usability of the output and propose solutions to this problem.
Revolutionizing Natural Interaction with Swiss German: A Glimpse into the Future of Conversational AI Claudio Paonessa and Yanick Schraner, Researchers at FHNW
Get ready for a glimpse into the future of natural interaction with computer systems in Swiss German! We leveraged the latest advancements in speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology to create an engaging and interactive experience that showcases the results of our cutting-edge research.
Exploring the Acceptance of Intelligent Voice Assistants in Home Care Applications: Opportunities and Obstacles [10 mins presentation, 10 mins discussion] Edith Birrer, Researcher at iHomeLab – HSLU (Hochschule Luzern)
In the scope of co-creation sessions, care workers provided insights on applications and on concerns about Intelligent Voice Assistants (IVA) in the home of their clients or patients. The sessions focused on the potential to support the care documentation process by IVA. Participants’ expectations and worries spanned from the ability to handle dialects, to confidentiality issues, to integration in existing care documentation systems. However, there is a general openness toward the idea to employ IVA as means to improve the quality of care. The challenge foreseen for using IVA is to become as time efficient as care documentation systems in place. Alternatively, as suggested by participants, IVA could complement existing processes or even create new ones in the care context.
If you want to join, please fill in the following registration form by April 27:https://forms.gle/PmRQENtY8aybJeby5 Please note that the registration form includes information for the SwissNLP General Assembly which is co-located.