Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho
Head of Data Science Chair and Founding Spokesman of CAIDAS
Data Science Chair (Informatik X)
University of Würzburg
Campus Hubland Nord
Emil-Fischer-Straße 50
97074 Würzburg
Germany
Email: hotho[at]informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
Phone:(+49 931) 31 - 88453
Mobile: (+49) 173 259 40 52
Office: Room 50.03.004
(Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz und Data Science (CAIDAS))
Office Hours: By appointment only
I am a professor at the University of Würzburg and the head of the Data Science Chair and the founding spokesman of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Prior, I was a senior researcher at the University of Kassel. I started my research at the AIFB Institute at the University of Karlsruhe where I was working on text mining, ontology learning and semantic web related topics. My previous work also involved working at the KDE group of the University of Kassel on topics like data mining, semantic web mining and social media analysis. For a couple of years I've been a member of the L3S Research Center located in Hannover.
I’m a data science expert focusing on developing new data science algorithms and machine learning models for a diverse set of applications and in several interdisciplinary collaborations, which provide interesting challenges for my research. Understanding the models by explainable AI techniques enables my group to effectively build models tailored to the specific challenges of the various application areas.
In the past few years, applying data science and machine learning to ecosystems, environmental & climate data has become one of my central research areas. We have successfully developed deep learning methods for improving climate models in the BigData@Geo project and its successor BigData@Geo 2.0 (jointly with Heiko Paeth) as well as machine learning-based air pollution models in the EveryAware and p2Map project. We’re also analyzing data from smart beehives to understand bee behavior and detect anomalies as swarming events in the we4Bee and BeeConnected (collaboration with Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter) projects.
Another of my major research areas is the work on LLM for Text Mining and NLP in combination with explicitly represented knowledge aka knowledge graphs. Here my group focuses on adapting LLMs and extracting or enriching them with knowledge for our applications, for example in LitBERT to learn more about characters and character networks in novels. We have already worked on methods for representation learning, information extraction, metric and ontology learning and KG enrichment for the Semantic Web and a combination of semantic representations with language models. Specifically, we are developing models for sentiment analysis, scene segmentation and relation detection. With these models, we are able to analyze the development of texts over longer periods: For example, we can follow the plot in fictional novels by tracking the detected relations between characters over scenes, or measure the development of engagement in streams on twitch.tv using sentiment analysis.
To achieve our research objectives, we’re utilizing a rich set of methodological approaches like Knowledge enriched ML, Large Language Models, Time Series and Sequence Modeling, Representation and Metric Learning and Deep Learning for Imbalanced Data, which are described in detail on my group’s research page. For a lot of our research results, we have developed and maintain tools and websites. The most known tools are Bibsonomy, a social bookmark system for publications and We4Bee, a smart beehive monitoring system.
In terms of scientific self-governance, I actively contribute as a PC member, reviewer, and editor across various journals, conferences, and workshops, most recently as an editor in chief for the new diamond open access journal Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK).
Projects
Natural Language Processing und Digital Humanities
- LitBERT (DFG, 2023-2026)
- KILiMod (BMBF, 2023-2024)
- Kallimachos (BMBF, 2014-2017, extended to 2019)
- CLiGS (BMBF, 2015 -2019, extended to 2020)
- MOTIV (bidt, 2021 - 2023)
ML for Ecosystem and Climate Modeling
- BigData@Geo2 (EFRE, 2023-2027)
- BeeConnected (2021-2024)
- BigData@Geo (EFRE, 2017-2021)
- p2map: Learning Environmental Maps (DFG, 2016-2019)
- we4Bee (Audi Stiftung 2019 - 2021)
- EveryAware: Enhance environmental awareness through social information technologies (EU FET, 2011-2014)
Security and Fraud
- DeepScan (BMBF, 2018 -2021)
- Promotionsförderung im Rahmen des Doktorandenprogramms des ZD.B (ZD.B Fellowships, 2017-2020)
Physics Informed Deep Learning
- MAGNET (2022-2025)
- P-BIM (2022-2024)
- AI@Knauf (2019-2023)
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KI@FlowChief (2023-2028)
ML for Publication Data
- HydrAS (DFG, 2022-2025)
- REGIO (BMBF, 2018-2021)
- BibSonomy
- Pragmatics and Semantics in Social Tagging Systems (DFG, 2011-2016)
- PUMA: Academic Publication Management (DFG, 2009-2015)
Industry
- AI@Knauf (2019-2023)
- Modelling and Recommendation for Customer Engagement (adidas, 2017-2022)
- KI@FlowChief (FlowChief, 2023-2028)
- Best Paper Honorable Mention: "Developing a Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification Head", Julia Wunderle, Julian Schubert, Antonella Cacciatore, Albin Zehe, Jan Pfister, Andreas Hotho at NAACL 2024
- Best Paper Award: "Enhancing Sequential Next-Item Prediction through Modelling Non-Item Pages" , Elisabeth Fischer, Daniel Schlör, Albin Zehe, Andreas Hotho on the Fourth International Workshop on Advanced Neural Algorithms and Theories for Recommender Systems (NeuRec) at ICDM 2023
- Best ML Innovation Award: "Deep Learning for Climate Model Output Statistics", Michael Steininger, Daniel Abel, Katrin Ziegler, Anna Krause, Heiko Paeth, Andreas Hotho at Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop at NeurIPS 2020 (link)
- Best Student Paper Award: "Evaluating the multi-task learning approach for land use regression modelling of air pollution", Andrzej Dulny, Michael Steininger, Florian Lautenschlager, Anna Krause, Andreas Hotho at FAIML 2020
- Best Paper Award: "Financial Fraud Detection with Improved Neural Arithmetic Logic Units" by Daniel Schlör, Markus Ring, Anna Krause, Andreas Hotho on the Fifth Workshop on MIning DAta for financial applicationS Co-Hosted by ECML- PKDD 2020
- SWSA Ten-Year Award: "Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems", Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho, Gerd Stumme at the International Semantic Web Conference 2018 (link )
- Best Paper Award: "HypTrails: A Bayesian Approach for Comparing Hypotheses About Human Trails on the Web” Philipp Singer, Denis Helic, Andreas Hotho and Markus Strohmaier, at WWW Conference 2015 (link)
- Honorable mention of the paper: “Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems” Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme at ISWC 2008 (link)
- The 7 years most influential paper award: “Information Retrieval in Folksonomies: Search and Ranking”, Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, Christoph Schmitz, Gerd Stumme at ESWC 2013 (link )
Current activities:
- Executive director: Institute of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg (2013 - 2016, 2023 - 2026)
- Founding spokesman of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDAS)
- Member of the collegial leadership of the Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität (Kallimachos)
- Spokesperson of the Fachgruppe Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining und Maschinelles Lernen at GI
- BAFög coordinator for the computer science department at the University of Würzburg
- Editor-in-Chief: Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK) since 2023
- Editor: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Journal) since 2023
- Senior PC Chair/Area Chair for the Research Track ECML-PKDD
- Selected PC memberships: ACM SIGKDD (regularly), AAAI (regularly), WWW (regularly), ISWC (regularly), ESWC (regularly), ECML PKDD (regularly)
- Reviewer for journals, e.g., International Journal of Information Security (IJISS), Journal on Data Semantics (JoDS), ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Machine Learning Journal, Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE)
- Reviewer for a variety of workshops
- Reviewer of research grants for the DFG and the European Union
Past activities:
- Research Track Chair: International Semantic Web Conference 2021
- PC Chair:
- Editor in Chief: Journal of Web Semantics 2018 - 2022
- Editorial boards:
- Semantic Web Journal 2009 - 2018
- Journal of Web Semantics (data mining area chair) 2013 -2018
- Transaction on Internet Technology 2013 -2018
- Track Co-Chair
- ESWC 2013
- Hypertext 2009, 2011
- Demo Co-Chair ECML PKDD 2013
- Workshops and Tutorial Chair KCap 2009
- Local Co-Chair GI–Workshopwoche “Lernen – Lehren – Wissen – Adaptivität” 2003, 2010
- PC Co-Chair for a variety of workshops, e.g.:
- RSWeb at RecSys 2012-2015
- MUSE at ECML PKDD 2010-2015
- Workshop series on semantic web mining at the ECML PKDD 2001- 2005
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ConvMOS: climate model output statistics with deep learning in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (2023). 37(1) 136–166.
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InDiReCT: Language-Guided Zero-Shot Deep Metric Learning for Images (2022).
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Detecting Scenes in Fiction: A new Segmentation Task (2021).
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Density-based weighting for imbalanced regression in Machine Learning, (A. Appice; S. Escalera; J. A. Gamez; H. Trautmann, Eds.) (2021).
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Emote-Controlled: Obtaining Implicit Viewer Feedback through Emote based Sentiment Analysis on Comments of Popular Twitch.tv Channels in {ACM} Transactions on Social Computing (2020). 3(2) 1–34.
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iNALU: Improved Neural Arithmetic Logic Unit in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2020). 3 71.
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LM4KG: Improving Common Sense Knowledge Graphs with Language Models J. Z. Pan, V. Tamma, C. d’Amato, K. Janowicz, B. Fu, A. Polleres, O. Seneviratne, L. Kagal (Eds.) (2020). 456–473.
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Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative in PLoS ONE (2015). 10(8) e0136763.
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Hyptrails: A bayesian approach for comparing hypotheses about human trails (2015).
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Awareness and Learning in Participatory Noise Sensing in PLoS ONE (2013). 8(12) e81638.
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Collective Information Extraction with Context-Specific Consistencies. in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, P. A. Flach, T. D. Bie, N. Cristianini (Eds.) (2012). (Vol. 7523) 728–743.
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The Social Bookmark and Publication Management System BibSonomy in The VLDB Journal (2010). 19(6) 849–875.
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Tag Recommendations in Social Bookmarking Systems in AI Communications, (E. Giunchiglia, Ed.) (2008). 21(4) 231–247.
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Learning Ontologies to Improve Text Clustering and Classification in From Data and Information Analysis to Knowledge Engineering (2006). 334–341.
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Learning Concept Hierarchies from Text Corpora using Formal Concept Analysis in Journal on Artificial Intelligence Research (2005). 24 305–339.