Autonomous systems rely on AI to make decisions and adapt to changes. What role do security considerations play when designing such systems? This talk will give an overview of the interaction and combination of IT security with artificial intelligence.

While digitization and digitalization require substantial organic change (1) and often times M&A (2), partnering represents a 3^rd lever for strategy execution. Partners can come from multiple backgrounds. Some working for-profit, such as software vendors, consultants or incubators. Yet there are interesting players from the non-profit arena, such as governmental institutions or universities. Universities among others focus on education but also on research that ideally contributes to solving complex and practically relevant problems. Having started with a project seminar in 2010 in collaboration with the chair of Prof. Dr. Bernd Hellingrath, Arvato and ERCIS have repeated multiple projects on interesting digital challenges. Multiple people have been hired on all levels from BSc over MSc to PhD. On top partners have jointly created new collaboration formats up to the The ERCIS Omni-channel Lab (https://omni-channel.ercis.org/) which successfully augmented 1000 experts at Arvato CRM and ended after 3 fruitful years under leadership of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Jörg Becker, Prof. Dr. Gottfried Vossen and Prof. Dr. Heike Trautmann and Karsten Kraume. The presentation will refer to some specific projects driven by Matthias Carnein, MSc, Markus Heuchert, MSc and Dipl.-Inf. Leschek Homann and multiple colleagues at Arvato. The presentation will also show, how the broader ecosystem including Universities of Paderborn (Prof. Dr. Daniel Beverungen), Duisburg/Essen (Prof. Dr. Stefan Stieglitz), Nürnberg-Erlangen (Prof. Dr. Martin Matzner) to name a few was leveraged. The example at hand can serve as a reference and shows, how “easily” a partnership can be started and grow, assuming firm belief in the complementarity of academia and practice as well as an entrepreneurial mindset on both ends.

In spite of massive investment and increased adoption of digital services, citizens continue to use traditional channels to interact with public organizations. The channel choice (CC) field of research tries to understand citizens’ interactions with public authorities to make the interaction more efficient and increase citizen satisfaction. However, most studies have been conducted either as surveys of hypothetical services or in experimental settings, leading to a lack of empirical data from actual use contexts. Therefore, in the lunchtime seminar, I will present the results of a sequential mixed methods study which combines observations of citizen-caseworker interaction in a call center, contextual interviews with callers, and a survey classifying topics from 10,000 telephone calls. Specifically, the study explores the multiplex nature of real-life CC and the problems which cause people to call.

The talk describes how commercial companies create operating systems with highly integrated services, which scientists use in every phase of their daily work and which by the way produce data about this work. These data, in turn, are processed by the commercial providers and converted into further products, which are now offered to the science bureaucracy as a tool for recruitment and research planning. The structure and marketing of both the tools for scientists and the controlling tools for the administration have features that are widely known from electronic environments (compliance through convenience, vendor-lock-in), but also features that show at the same time elements of the centrally planned economy  and (although at first sight incompatible with it) a strong competitive connotation. The presentation also discusses the possible consequences of such a data-driven science control for individual researchers  as well as for science as a social enterprise.

Large-scale spatial systems, such as river catchments, crowds, or land use systems, are difficult to fully analyze empirically. Geosimulation models are built to enable analyses of these systems. On the one hand, geosimulation models help us to better understand the system, because we can 'experiment' with its parameters. On the other hand, geosimulation models are used to make projections of the potential future development of the system under a set of scenarios. Scenario studies are often used to simulate the effects of a range of policy options, to inform decision makers about the potential impacts of the policies. This requires models that are valid now and in the projected future, as policy decisions based on erroneous model projections can be costly and/or irreversible. The overarching goal of my research lab is to better quantify the predictive value of geosimulation models. In this presentation, I show some examples of geosimulation modelling studies, with potential links to the research in the department of Information Systems in terms of the modelled systems (e.g. energy supply) as well the used methods (e.g. error propagation and optimization).

Whereas digitization offers countless opportunities to individuals as well as to organizations, public administration lacks behind in making use of advanced technologies and applying information management tools. However, as public authorities have recognized the potential of digitization for service delivery and administrative organization their efforts in establishing common digitization strategies, institutions, and electronic service delivery are faced with several challenges. Recent and ongoing research found that problems and hurdles with the implementation of all these approaches are manifold including given administrative structures, civil servants competencies or financial restrictions. In Germany, for instance, one major structural hurdle is the constitutional given federalism, which internally slows down decision processes on eGovernment actions and complicates the implementation of common eGovernment solutions like the planned interconnected portals. Externally, citizens and companies in federations are faced with confusing responsibilities not knowing where to apply for a public service. Therefore, it must be the aim of highest priority for the public sector to advance eGovernment solutions to gain a higher degree of internal efficiency, to provide citizens with convenient services and responsibilities and, lastly, to be prepared for future tasks.