Skip to main content

Tag: Public Event

Workshop on the Initiative PIVOT: Political Insights & Views Over Time

PIVOT: Political Insights & Views Over Time is a new research initiative that aims to track the evolution of political opinions and public stances over time. 

In this context, we are seeking collaborators who bring diverse perspectives from both academic and industry backgrounds and are interested in participating in a half-day workshop. This event will serve as a collaborative platform to better understand the needs and expectations of all involved parties, and align our project goals with these.

What is PIVOT?

The initiative PIVOT is designed to analyze and map out the shifts in the opinions of politicians and public figures, offering insights into why and how their positions on key issues evolve over time. With the power of modern AI methodologies, most notably Large Language Models, and access to comprehensive datasets (SwissdoxCuria Vista etc.), we are equipped to track and interpret long-term opinion shifts across different domains and formats, including PDFs, speeches, and public statements.

Why This Project Matters:

  1. Fighting Fake News: In today’s fast-paced digital world, misinformation can spread faster than facts. Political statements are often taken out of context, which can fuel fake news and disinformation. By analyzing long-term trends in political stances, PIVOT offers a more accurate, contextualized view of politicians’ opinions over time, helping both the public and media outlets verify the authenticity of statements and counteract misinformation.
  2. Democracy at Stake?: With democracy being challenged globally, understanding political accountability is more crucial than ever. The project aims to create transparency around political shifts, allowing voters, policymakers, and industry leaders to track how politicians’ views evolve over time, beyond the typical 4-5 year election cycles.
  3. Long-Term Political Analysis: Politicians often focus on short-term outcomes, usually up to the next election cycle. PIVOT, however, takes a broader view. By using longitudinal data analysis, we aim to uncover patterns of opinion changes over years or even decades and explore the key events or influences that drive these changes.
  4. Public Relations & Media: For media companies or public relations teams, PIVOT’s analysis offers valuable insights into how politicians’ public stances align with or deviate from historical positions. This can be leveraged to craft informed messaging, fact-check statements, and anticipate future shifts.
  5. Risk Management & Consulting: Political shifts often influence business strategies, regulatory frameworks,and market stability. Partnering on this project could offer data-driven insights for businesses seeking to navigate evolving political landscapes, particularly for industries like energy, finance, or healthcare.

Meet Fellow Experts

By joining PIVOT, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with leading experts in political sciencedata analytics, and AI. Together, we aim to generate actionable insights that can benefit not only academia but also industries that rely on understanding political riskpublic sentiment, and long-term policy trends.

Next steps

To bring PIVOT to life, we will conduct the first half-day workshop that will take place on November 25th 2024 in Bern.

We aim to gather a diverse group of potential partners from academia, industry, media, and other relevant sectors to discuss the project’s concept in detail, exchange ideas, and explore how different organizations can contribute their expertise and resources. The workshop will help us refine the objectives and identify key areas of research where collaboration is essential. Additionally, it will provide an opportunity for participants to network and connect with others working in areas such as political data analysismedia fact-checking, and longitudinal political insights.

During the workshop we will also elaborate the next steps for continuing and supporting PIVOT as a long-term project.

What we need from you

If you are interested in the project and would like to take part in the mentioned workshop, please fill in and send us this feedback and contact Veton Matoshi (msv3@bfh.ch). We would like to know about your competencies and experiences relevant for the potential project.

We value every expression of interest and potential contribution to this project. To ensure a productive and focused workshop, we’ll carefully review all submissions and send official invitations to participants whose expertise and experience align closely with the project’s current needs and direction. We appreciate your understanding as we strive to create a balanced and effective collaborative environment for this initial workshop.

If you have any questions or require further information, please don’t hesitate to contact us at any time.

Expert Group Meeting – Governance for Growth with Data & AI

The next Expert Meeting will take place on October 24th. We are excited to have talks presented by the following Agenda: 

15:00 Welcome and Intro

  • Philipp Kuntschik & Sarah Seyr, Co-Leads of the Expert Group

15:15 Featured presentation

  • Nicole Königstein, Chief AI Officer: GenAI Prompt to Product Showdown: How to Use LangGraph and LLMs to Support Product Research. Look forward to a hands-on session!
    Find Nicole’s Profile here https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-koenigstein/

16:00 Joint Workshop: How to leverage AI in your project governance and user-friendly  
17:30 Closing and Apero 

Join us at Pädagogische Hochschule Zürich (PHZH, Lagerstrasse 5, 8090 Zürich), close to the Zurich Main Station on October 24th at 15:00.

Use the following Google Forms link to register until October 18th

Webinar – The role of documents in RAG Applications

Join us for an insightful webinar where we explore how to transform a company’s documents into structured data, paving the way for advanced Generative AI applications.

As member of Data Innovation Alliance in this educational webinar we will guide you through the process of converting diverse document formats into usable data. You’ll learn about advanced data extraction techniques, ensuring data accuracy and traceability, and see real-world applications in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Ideal for professionals aiming to leverage AI for augmented reading, chat, analytics, and automation.

Key Takeaways:

  • Understanding document complexity and data extraction
  • Techniques for ensuring data accuracy
  • Practical RAG application insights

Agenda:

  • 5 min  –  Welcome and Introduction 
  • 15 min – Key Challenges and learnings of extracting data from unstructured sources 
  • 15 min – Practical use cases in augmented reading, RAG 
  • 10 min – Q&A

The webinar will be recorded for on-demand watching.

Webinar Geoinformation – Auffindbarkeit und Nutzbarkeit quo vadis? (Deutsch)

Es gibt eine Viezahl an Daten, die einen räumlichen Bezug haben – nicht nur erhoben durch Unternehmen oder Forschungseinrichtungen, sondern auch durch Bundesbehörden oder Kantonale Ämter. Doch wie findet man die “richtigen” Daten und wie kann man diese in eigene Anwendungen und Dienstleistungen integrieren?

In der erste Präsentation dieses Webinars stellt ein Team der FHNW  den GeoHarvester vor, ein Proof-of-Concept (PoC) einer einfach zu bedienenden, mehrsprachigen Suchmaschine für Schweizer Geodienste – mit offener API und offenem Quellcode.

Die zweite Präsentation von Dr. Ralph Straumann beleuchtet den Stand der Schweizer Geoinformations-«Landschaft» im Jahr 2024 sowie aktuelle und künftige Herausforderungen bezüglich der Produktion und Bereitstellung von Geodaten – und versucht, einige Lösungsansätze aufzuzeigen.

Prof. Stefan F. Keller rundet das Webinar ab. Bei allen Referaten besteht die Möglichkeit, Fragen zu stellen.

Programm (90 min.):
11:00 Einführung (Stefan Keller FH OST) (5 min.)
11:05 GeoHarvester PoC – eine Suchmaschine für Geodienste der Schweiz (Pia Bereuter, Friedrich Striewski und Elia Ferrari, FHNW Muttenz)
11:40 Schweizer Geoinformationen: Connecting the dots, perpetual beta (Ralph Straumann, EBP) 
12:15 Geoinformation-Auffindbarkeit und -Nutzbarkeit quo vadis? (Stefan Keller, FH OST)

Diese Veranstaltung wird in Zusammenarbeit mit dem GEOSummit und dem Innovation Booster databooster (Focus Topic Spatial Data Analytics) durchgeführt.

Challenges in Data Management in Robotics Workshop

The Workshop on Challenges in Data Management in Robotics aims to bring together robotics enthusiasts, researchers, and industry professionals to discuss and address the pressing issues surrounding data management in robotics applications. Through keynotes, case studies, and breakout groups, participants will gain valuable insights into tackling data-related challenges in robotics and explore potential solutions.

Organized by IB Robotics and IB Artificial Intelligence

Webinar: Potential added-value of Artificial Intelligence-based solutions to improving the quality of care of seniors

There are many potential applications of AI in healthcare, particularly in the care of older people. This mainly refers to algorithm-based computing techniques that manage and analyze large data sets to make conclusions and predictions: from clinical decision support systems that can help detect delirium from medical records to wearable devices that can predict the risk of falls.

In this webinar, the needs and challenges of older people will be presented and defined and possible solutions based on artificial intelligence methods for specific application examples will be demonstrated.

12h00-12h10: Presentation of Innovation Booster SILVER AGING
12h10-12h20: Presentation of Innovation Booster ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
12h20-12h30 : Dr. Vincent Grek – AI, medicine and sport for elderly people
12h30-12h40 : Daria Mühlethaler – Supporting the Care Givers with GenAI
12h40-12h50: Q&A
12h50-13h00 : Prof. Dr. Tobias Nef – AI and Digital Biomarkers for patients with Neurodegenerative diseases
13h00-13h10 : Dennis Eitner
13h10-13h20 : Q&A
13h20-13h30 : Wrap-up

Organized by IB Silver Aging and IB Artificial Intelligence

Webinar: 12. Learn & Lunch – Challenges for SMEs: How can responsible AI be used as a competitive advantage (Deutsch)

Due to rising social expectations and new laws on the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI), it is becoming increasingly important for companies to ensure the trustworthiness and ethical acceptability of AI applications. However, instead of viewing these requirements merely as a challenge, they also offer companies the opportunity to innovate and differentiate themselves from the competition. The aim of this event is to jointly explore the business challenges in the area of responsible AI. It will also discuss how companies can proactively use these requirements to tap into new innovation opportunities and position themselves sustainably in the market.

Organized by GRdigital in cooperation with the Focus Topic Responsible AI and Expert Group Data Ethics, of the data innovation alliance

Info-Webinar IB Databooster and Artificial Intelligence

The Service à l’Innovation et à la Recherche (SIR) of the HES-SO is organizing a webinar on June 24, 2024 (12:00-13:00) to present two ideas supported by the Innosuisse Innovation Booster program. The funding opportunities in the frame of the Innovation Booster databooster and Artificial Intelligence, for which Nabil Abdennadher, professor at HEPIA, is the representative in French-speaking Switzerland, will be introduced and explained.

Organized by HES-SO, HEPIA and the data innovation alliance

SwissText Analytics Conference

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 local universities and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW).

Registration is open from the first of March. Early Bird Tickets are available until the fifth of May.

Swisstext is organised jointly by the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons (FHGR) and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) with the support of the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse) and several industrial sponsors.

General Chair: Prof. Corsin Capol (FHGR), Prof. Dr. Mark Cieliebak (ZHAW)
Program Chair: Prof. Dr. habil. Albert Weichselbraun (FHGR)
Scientific Track Chair: Dr. Claudiu Musat (Google)
Workshop Chair: Dr. Elisabeth Maier (Karakun AG)
Conference Happiness Manager: Lucas Zimmermann (FHGR)
Organizational Memory: Manuela Hürlimann (ZHAW)

Find the registration and more information on the official website!

Service Event: “Lernen, Netzwerken” – Showcase Kistler & Digitalization

Johannes Stühler
Head of Service Development
Sharon Joseph
Data Engineer
Gerrit Schatte
Lead Projects / Biz Dev Innovation Lab

We are excited to showcase how Kistler applies digitalization for efficiency gains, securing customer satisfaction and opening new market opportunities. We will explore the role of service operations for Kistler as an equipment manufacturer, the use of process mining for increasing process efficiency as well as the role Kistler’s Innovation Lab for implementing solutions addressing new markets. The event will be rounded off with a factory tour and a chance to network during an apéro.