Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho

Head of the data science chair (former DMIR Research Group)

Chair of Data Science (Informatik X)
University of Würzburg
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
Germany

Email: hotho[at]informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
Phone:(+49 931) 31 - 88453
Fax: (+49 931) 31 - 86732

Office: Room B012 (Computer Science Building M2)
Office Hours: By appointment only

About me

I am a professor at the University of Würzburg and the head of the data science chair (former DMIR group). 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.

Research interests

In general, my current research focus is on data science (formerly known as data mining), text mining and semantic web.

Meanwhile, for many years I have followed the idea to combine the processing of natural language with the explicitly represented knowledge known today as knowledge graphs. This naturally leads to research on a combination of Text Mining and NLP methods like representation learning, information extraction, metric learning and ontology learning with research on Semantic Web, or Web Science. To reach these goals, I use and adopt NLP, machine learning and data mining methods. Beside that, I also work on Sentiment Analysis, genre classification and quotation detection. I have applied these methods on historic literature, but also on Social Media data, most recently on chat messages from Twitch.tv.

Other areas I’m interested in and working on are ranking, recommendation and behavior analysis methods. Additionally, my research interests include Anomaly Detection and the analysis of Time Series mostly on the web but recently also on ERP and environmental data. Since many of these problems can be approached by black box machine learning and deep learning methods, another research area of mine is on explainable AI, to gather insights and understand the models.

To demonstrate my results, my group is working on different application systems: BibSonomy, Everyaware and We4Bee.

Projects

DZ.PTM
CLiGS
DeepScan
Knauf (2019-2022)
REGIO (2018-2019)
Adidas (2017-2021)
BigData@Geo (EFRE, 2017-2021)
Modelling and Recommendation for Customer Engagement (Industrial cooperation, 2017-2020)
Promotionsförderung im Rahmen des Doktoranden-programms des ZD.B (ZD.B Felloswhips, 2017-2020)
p2map: Learning Environmental Maps (DFG, 2016-2019)
eHumanities-Center Kallimachos (BMBF, 2014-2017, extended to 2019)
EveryAware: Enhance environmental awareness through social information technologies (EU FET, 2011-2014)
Pragmatics and Semantics in Social Tagging Systems (DFG, 2011-2016)
PUMA: Academic Publication Management (DFG, 2009-2015)

Activities

Speaker of the Fachgruppe Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining und Maschinelles Lernen
BAFög coordinator for the computer science department at the University of Würzburg

PC Chair: European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases 2019
Editor in Chief: Journal of Web Semantics since 2018
Editorial boards: Semantic Web Journal 2009 - 2018, Journal of Web Semantics (data mining area chair) 2013 -2018, Transaction on Internet Technology 2013 -2018
PC-Chair Hypertext 2013, Track Co-Chair ESWC 2013, Demo Co-Chair ECML PKDD 2013, Track Co-Chair Hypertext 2011, Local Co-Chair GI–Workshopwoche “Lernen – Lehren – Wissen – Adaptivität” 2010, Track Co-Chair Hypertext 2009, Workshops and Tutorial Chair KCap 2009, Local Co-Chair GI–Workshopwoche “Lernen – Lehren – Wissen – Adaptivität” 2003, PC Co-Chair for a variety of workshops, e.g. RSWeb at RecSys 2012-2015, MUSE at ECML PKDD 2010-2015 or a workshop series on semantic web mining at the ECML PKDD 2001-2005
Selected PC memberships for conferences: ACM SIGKDD (regularly), AAAI (regularly), WWW (regularly), ISWC (regularly), ESWC (regularly), ECML PKDD (regularly), WebSci 2014, WSDM 2013, CIKM 2011
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
Executive director of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg (2015, 2016)

Awards

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: “Philipp Singer, Denis Helic, Andreas Hotho and Markus Strohmaier, HypTrails: A Bayesian Approach for Comparing Hypotheses About Human Trails on the Web” at WWW Conference 2015 (link)
Honorable mention of the paper: “Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme, Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems” 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 )

Selected Publications

BibSonomy - The BibSonomy default CSL style

{ "authors" : [{ "lastname":"Hotho" , "initial":"A" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/hotho/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Zehe" , "initial":"A" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/zehe/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Dallmann" , "initial":"A" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/dallmann/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Pölitz" , "initial":"C" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/christian_poelitz/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Schlör" , "initial":"D" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/schloer/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Lautenschlager" , "initial":"F" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/lautenschlager/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Zoller" , "initial":"D" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/zoller/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Hettinger" , "initial":"L" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/hettinger/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Becker" , "initial":"M" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/becker/" , "mail":"none" }, { "lastname":"Niebler" , "initial":"T" , "url":"http://www.dmir.uni-wuerzburg.de/staff/niebler/" , "mail":"none" }]}

Awareness and Learning in Participatory Noise Sensing. Becker, Martin; Caminiti, Saverio; Fiorella, Donato; Francis, Louise; Gravino, Pietro; Haklay, Mordechai (Muki); Hotho, Andreas; Loreto, Vittorio; Mueller, Juergen; Ricchiuti, Ferdinando; Servedio, Vito D. P.; Sîrbu, Alina; Tria, Francesca in PLoS ONE (2013). 8(12) e81638.

[ Abstract ] [ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

The Social Bookmark and Publication Management System BibSonomy. Benz, Dominik; Hotho, Andreas; Jäschke, Robert; Krause, Beate; Mitzlaff, Folke; Schmitz, Christoph; Stumme, Gerd in The VLDB Journal (2010). 19(6) 849–875.

[ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ]

Learning Ontologies to Improve Text Clustering and Classification. Bloehdorn, Stephan; Cimiano, Philipp; Hotho, Andreas in From Data and Information Analysis to Knowledge Engineering (2006). 334–341.

[ Abstract ] [ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

@article{10.1371/journal.pone.0136763,
  abstract = {<p>The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.</p>},
  author = {Sîrbu, Alina and Becker, Martin and Caminiti, Saverio and De Baets, Bernard and Elen, Bart and Francis, Louise and Gravino, Pietro and Hotho, Andreas and Ingarra, Stefano and Loreto, Vittorio and Molino, Andrea and Mueller, Juergen and Peters, Jan and Ricchiuti, Ferdinando and Saracino, Fabio and Servedio, Vito D. P. and Stumme, Gerd and Theunis, Jan and Tria, Francesca and Van den Bossche, Joris},
  journal = {PLoS ONE},
  keywords = {2015 air airprobe everyaware for:dmir game myown pollution quality selected},
  month = {08},
  number = 8,
  pages = {e0136763},
  publisher = {Public Library of Science},
  title = {Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative},
  volume = 10,
  year = 2015
}

%0 Journal Article
%1 10.1371/journal.pone.0136763
%A Sîrbu, Alina
%A Becker, Martin
%A Caminiti, Saverio
%A De Baets, Bernard
%A Elen, Bart
%A Francis, Louise
%A Gravino, Pietro
%A Hotho, Andreas
%A Ingarra, Stefano
%A Loreto, Vittorio
%A Molino, Andrea
%A Mueller, Juergen
%A Peters, Jan
%A Ricchiuti, Ferdinando
%A Saracino, Fabio
%A Servedio, Vito D. P.
%A Stumme, Gerd
%A Theunis, Jan
%A Tria, Francesca
%A Van den Bossche, Joris
%D 2015
%I Public Library of Science
%J PLoS ONE
%N 8
%P e0136763
%R 10.1371/journal.pone.0136763
%T Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0136763
%V 10
%X <p>The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.</p>

Learning Concept Hierarchies from Text Corpora using Formal Concept Analysis. Cimiano, Philipp; Hotho, Andreas; Staab, Steffen in Journal on Artificial Intelligence Research (2005). 24 305–339.

[ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

Tag Recommendations in Social Bookmarking Systems. Jäschke, Robert; Marinho, Leandro; Hotho, Andreas; Schmidt-Thieme, Lars; Stumme, Gerd in AI Communications, (E. Giunchiglia, ed.) (2008). 21(4) 231–247.

[ Abstract ] [ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

@article{10.1371/journal.pone.0081638,
  abstract = {<p>The development of ICT infrastructures has facilitated the emergence of new paradigms for looking at society and the environment over the last few years. Participatory environmental sensing, i.e. directly involving citizens in environmental monitoring, is one example, which is hoped to encourage learning and enhance awareness of environmental issues. In this paper, an analysis of the behaviour of individuals involved in noise sensing is presented. Citizens have been involved in noise measuring activities through the WideNoise smartphone application. This application has been designed to record both objective (noise samples) and subjective (opinions, feelings) data. The application has been open to be used freely by anyone and has been widely employed worldwide. In addition, several test cases have been organised in European countries. Based on the information submitted by users, an analysis of emerging awareness and learning is performed. The data show that changes in the way the environment is perceived after repeated usage of the application do appear. Specifically, users learn how to recognise different noise levels they are exposed to. Additionally, the subjective data collected indicate an increased user involvement in time and a categorisation effect between pleasant and less pleasant environments.</p>},
  author = {Becker, Martin and Caminiti, Saverio and Fiorella, Donato and Francis, Louise and Gravino, Pietro and Haklay, Mordechai (Muki) and Hotho, Andreas and Loreto, Vittorio and Mueller, Juergen and Ricchiuti, Ferdinando and Servedio, Vito D. P. and Sîrbu, Alina and Tria, Francesca},
  journal = {PLoS ONE},
  keywords = {2013 analysis everyaware for:dmir myown noise selected sensing sys:relevantfor:l3s widenoise},
  month = 12,
  number = 12,
  pages = {e81638},
  publisher = {Public Library of Science},
  title = {Awareness and Learning in Participatory Noise Sensing},
  volume = 8,
  year = 2013
}

Collective Information Extraction with Context-Specific Consistencies. Klügl, Peter; Toepfer, Martin; Lemmerich, Florian; Hotho, Andreas; Puppe, Frank in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, P. A. Flach, T. D. Bie, N. Cristianini (eds.) (2012). (Vol. 7523) 728–743.

[ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

Emote-Controlled: Obtaining Implicit Viewer Feedback through Emote based Sentiment Analysis on Comments of Popular Twitch.tv Channels. Kobs, Konstantin; Zehe, Albin; Bernstetter, Armin; Chibane, Julian; Pfister, Jan; Tritscher, Julian; Hotho, Andreas in ACM Transactions on Social Computing (2020). 3(2) 1–34.

[ Abstract ] [ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

@article{benz2010social,
  abstract = {Social resource sharing systems are central elements of the Web 2.0 and use the same kind of lightweight knowledge representation, called folksonomy. Their large user communities and ever-growing networks of user-generated content have made them an attractive object of investigation for researchers from different disciplines like Social Network Analysis, Data Mining, Information Retrieval or Knowledge Discovery. In this paper, we summarize and extend our work on different aspects of this branch of Web 2.0 research, demonstrated and evaluated within our own social bookmark and publication sharing system BibSonomy, which is currently among the three most popular systems of its kind. We structure this presentation along the different interaction phases of a user with our system, coupling the relevant research questions of each phase with the corresponding implementation issues. This approach reveals in a systematic fashion important aspects and results of the broad bandwidth of folksonomy research like capturing of emergent semantics, spam detection, ranking algorithms, analogies to search engine log data, personalized tag recommendations and information extraction techniques. We conclude that when integrating a real-life application like BibSonomy into research, certain constraints have to be considered; but in general, the tight interplay between our scientific work and the running system has made BibSonomy a valuable platform for demonstrating and evaluating Web 2.0 research.},
  address = {Berlin / Heidelberg},
  author = {Benz, Dominik and Hotho, Andreas and Jäschke, Robert and Krause, Beate and Mitzlaff, Folke and Schmitz, Christoph and Stumme, Gerd},
  journal = {The VLDB Journal},
  keywords = {2010 WueSFU bericht bibsonomy for:dmir myown publication selected social sys:hidden:PUMA-website system tagging taggingsurvey tau vldb},
  month = {dec},
  number = 6,
  pages = {849&ndash;875},
  publisher = {Springer},
  title = {The Social Bookmark and Publication Management System BibSonomy},
  volume = 19,
  year = 2010
}

iNALU: Improved Neural Arithmetic Logic Unit. Schlör, Daniel; Ring, Markus; Hotho, Andreas in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2020). 3 71.

[ Abstract ] [ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

@article{jaeschke2008tag,
  abstract = {Collaborative tagging systems allow users to assign keywords - so called "tags" - to resources. Tags are used for navigation, finding resources and serendipitous browsing and thus provide an immediate benefit for users. These systems usually include tag recommendation mechanisms easing the process of finding good tags for a resource, but also consolidating the tag vocabulary across users. In practice, however, only very basic recommendation strategies are applied. In this paper we evaluate and compare several recommendation algorithms on large-scale real life datasets: an adaptation of user-based collaborative filtering, a graph-based recommender built on top of the FolkRank algorithm, and simple methods based on counting tag occurences. We show that both FolkRank and Collaborative Filtering provide better results than non-personalized baseline methods. Moreover, since methods based on counting tag occurrences are computationally cheap, and thus usually preferable for real time scenarios, we discuss simple approaches for improving the performance of such methods. We show, how a simple recommender based on counting tags from users and resources can perform almost as good as the best recommender.},
  address = {Amsterdam},
  author = {Jäschke, Robert and Marinho, Leandro and Hotho, Andreas and Schmidt-Thieme, Lars and Stumme, Gerd},
  editor = {Giunchiglia, Enrico},
  journal = {AI Communications},
  keywords = {2008 bookmarking for:dmir myown recommendations recommender selected social tagging taggingsurvey},
  number = 4,
  pages = {231-247},
  publisher = {IOS Press},
  title = {Tag Recommendations in Social Bookmarking Systems},
  volume = 21,
  year = 2008
}

Hyptrails: A bayesian approach for comparing hypotheses about human trails. Singer, P.; Helic, D.; Hotho, A.; Strohmaier, M. (2015).

[ Abstract ] [ BibTeX ] [ EndNote ] [ URL ] [ Download ]

Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative. Sîrbu, Alina; Becker, Martin; Caminiti, Saverio; De Baets, Bernard; Elen, Bart; Francis, Louise; Gravino, Pietro; Hotho, Andreas; Ingarra, Stefano; Loreto, Vittorio; Molino, Andrea; Mueller, Juergen; Peters, Jan; Ricchiuti, Ferdinando; Saracino, Fabio; Servedio, Vito D. P.; Stumme, Gerd; Theunis, Jan; Tria, Francesca; Van den Bossche, Joris in PLoS ONE (2015). 10(8) e0136763.

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List of all publications: http://dmir.org/staff/hotho/pubs

Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=eWTzXFAAAAAJ

DBLP Profile: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/h/Hotho:Andreas