Management & Society

In a cooperation with World-Direct eBusiness Solutions GmbH (https://www.world-direct.at/), different possibilities of human-chatbot interaction in customer service scenarios are investigated. The aim is to explore the use of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems for various application contexts, and to investigate corresponding potentials for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This includes the definition of practical use cases and the development of a proof of concept to test and evaluate these use cases.

In the "Smart Inclusion" project, augmented reality is used in the form of smart glasses. It is evaluated to what extent these can be used by people with disabilities to strengthen their individual skills and resources for activities of daily living. The research process will be cooperated and supported by Lebenshilfe Tirol, which is a social institution that offers its residents the opportunity to live and work independently in shared apartments.

The shortage of skilled workers in the field of software development is damaging competitiveness in Austria as a business location. For this reason, universities are targeting offerings at working professionals, often using blended learning concepts. This involves integrating online and face-to-face teaching in order to offer students increased flexibility. Although blended learning concepts have already proven to be effective, students are confronted with challenges arising from the online component of blended learning approaches on the one hand and the subject matter of programming on the other hand. An Intelligent Tutoring System that provides students with individualized, immediate, and instructive feedback is proposed as a solution.

The project aims to evaluate and optimize the current online communication policies at the district hospital BKH St. Johann in Tirol (https://www.khsj.at/). To this end, students from the MCI study programs Digital Business & Software Engineering and International Business & Management help improve the usability of the hospital's website and as well as its social media presence. Respective project tasks include formal usability tests, stakeholder analyses and the development of a social media strategy.

The project "Game Over Eva(sion): Securing Deep Learning with Game Theory" aims to protect deep learning classifiers against targeted attacks. Deep learning classifiers are not only popular in scientific research but are also more and more adapted to the daily life, as self-driving cars, smartphones, and digital personal assistants use these kind of algorithms. Unfortunately, recent research has shown that almost all deep learning classifiers are vulnerable to so-called evasion attacks. In an evasion attack, an attacker can slightly modify a benign object and by this achieves a misclassification with a very high probability. The robustness of deep learning classifiers to these attacks is an open problem. We will model the competition of an attacker who is able to launch an evasion attack and the defender who wants to train a deep learning classifier that is robust against such an attack with means of game theory. In a first step, we will analyze which concepts of other research areas, such as adversarial classification, can be translated to the domain of secure deep learning. Then, we will develop a game-theoretic model that captures all relevant aspects and dependencies between the attacker's and the defender's strategies. In the course of the project, we expect the first theoretically well-founded results on the achievable security of deep learning classifiers in the presence of evasion attacks. Furthermore, we will evaluate existing countermeasures against evasion attacks to gain insights about their optimality when facing a strategic attacker. Finally, we want to implement the key properties from out theoretical models in a practical deep learning classifier. We will compare our classifier against other state-of-the-art classifiers in terms of robustness against evasion attacks and accuracy on benign input objects. By this, we can validate if it is possible to make deep learning classifiers robust against evasion attacks. The expected results of the project will enable us to judge if deep learning classifiers are suitable for scenarios where an attacker has incentives to explicitly fool them, i.e., security-critical areas and widespread consumer products.

SMiLe examines the conditions under which solutions using homomorphic encryption are suitable for harnessing the potential of sensitive data for machine learning. The potential of the machine learning techniques is evaluated through two use cases, dealing with employee segmentation and predictive maintenance, respectively. SMiLe contributes to the establishment of a cooperative-creative ecosystem in which various actors interact trustingly, symbiotically, and independently and implement previously unimaginable solutions in which not only data protection and security are guaranteed, but also previously unused potential of data can be exploited. The project will extend existing platforms to provide solutions that enable the creation and use of machine learning models using homomorphically encrypted data.

In coordination with Holo-Light GmbH, the aim is to investigate the user behaviour of AR/VR streaming services by means of a two-part study. Specifically, the study is intended to answer the following question: Is there a demand for the streaming of AR/VR applications and the associated advantages (more computing power, increased security, support of different AR/VR devices, less effort for data preparation)? Within the scope of the present proposal, a two-part study with the following parameters is to be carried out: - Method: Desktop Research, Quantitative Survey, Qualitative Interviews Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Integration of various topics in the context of a changing world of work: * women‘s careers in mathematics and computer science * creation & agility of jobs, lifelong learning, talented diversity & innovativeness, innovative technologies, organizational design * ESCO european skills and competences framework Women in Technology - Education & Career

In the course of an Interreg project "SMART VILLAGES Wipptal" set up for this purpose, a common understanding for a regional portal is to be developed for the communities located in the region (northern South Tyrol with 12 communities and southern South Tyrol with 6 communities). The sub-goal offered by MCI is to survey the logical structure, usability, possible integration options and a specification of the communication platform for the future according to scientific findings and to elaborate it together with the stakeholders.