Stephan Weibelzahl

I am coordinating the collaborative research project GlycoRec: We aim to support patients with diabetes through intelligent support on mobile devices and smartwatches. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the Adaptive Learning Systems initiative. Project duration: 01/2015 to 12/2016; funding approx.: 1.44m Euro

I was member of the the management committee of TwinTide: Towards the Integration of Transectorial IT Design and Evaluation. TwinTide is a European network of leading user experience researchers funded under the COST programme. Its main objective is to harmonise research and practice on design and evaluation methodologies for computing artefacts, across sectors and disciplines.

Until September 2013, I was Principal Investigator of the National e-Learning Laboratory (NELL). NELL is a usability lab tailored to the specific purpose of researching on-line media and on-line learning. It is an environment where learners and teachers are studied interacting with on-line resources and tools in order to either measure and analyse learning behaviour or to evaluate the tool's quality, including performance (learning gain), efficiency, effectiveness, usability and learning experience. The laboratory provides facilities for up to four learners that can be observed simultaneously through a variety of cameras, microphones, screen-recorders and keyboard logs. It also features an eye-tracker and a specialised set of software that can record and (semi-) automatically analyse these data streams. The lab can be used both for individual learner sessions as well as for collaborative settings where interaction between learners is monitored. Our blog describes some of the projects we have done.

Judith Masthoff (Aberdeen, UK), Alexandros Paramythis (Linz, Austria) and myself gave a tutorial at UMAP2010 on the Evaluation of Adaptive Systems.

The Adaptive Hypermedia conferences (since 2009 called UMAP) are the major forums for the scientific exchange and presentation of research on adaptive hypermedia and adaptive Web-based systems. The fifth edition of the conference, AH2008, took place in Hannover, Germany. I was serving as publicity chair for this conference.

Judith Masthoff (Aberdeen, UK), Alexandros Paramythis (Linz, Austria) and myself gave a tutorial at UM2007 on Formative Evaluation Methods for Adaptive Systems.

In ALS we provided the technological means through which lack of (or limited amounts of) face-to-face contact between instructors and learners, as well as amongst learners can be partially compensated for. So in fact, this project sucessfully brought together adaptive learning techniques and on-line collaboration.

In Up2UML we developed new content and training material for UML2. By using guidebooks, trainers can use this content in a flexible way for blended learning.

Together with Alexandros Paramythis (Linz, Austria) I organized two more workshops on the evaluation of adaptive systems at UM2003 and at AH2004 again. The proceedings of all three evaluation workshops are online.

Anna Strasser, Sandra Riedewald, and myself wrote a report on the Conference of the German Cognitive Society (KogWis01) in Leipzig. It explores the degree of interdisciplinarity of Cognitive Science in Germany. It is also available as pdf document and will appear in the Journal of the German Cognitive Society Kognitionswissenschaft. You may want to compare these results to a similar report on interdisciplinarity at KogWis96 by Anthony Jameson.

Together with Gerhard Weber and David Chin, I have organized a workshop on empirical evaluations of adaptive systems in conjunction with UM2001 in Sonthofen. The proceedings are available online.

I have been a member of the projects PAEDPSY and PSI which developed adaptive interactive learning courses for pedagogical psychology, including topics like problem solving, social perception, Piaget's developmental psychology, and the diagnostics of pupils (all courses currently in German only, sorry, we are working on this issue). These courses are part of the curriculum for all students at the University of Education and thousands (!) of students have been working with this interactive courseware.

All these courses are based on the authoring system NetCoach (website in German only) developed by Gerhard Weber. A variety of other NetCoach-courses, as well as a tutorial and a manual, is offered for free by the University of Education. The NetCoach server is also available for Linux now.

For my PhD I have been funded by the Graduate Programme Human and Machine Intelligence at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. This Graduate school has an interdisciplinary research programme which combines work from the areas of psychology, computer science and linguistics from a cognitive science perspective.

For my diploma thesis I developed and implemented an adaptive product recommendation system. CASTLE recommends vacation homes based on experience with other customers.