Contact:
Dr. Andrea Salfinger
Email: andrea.salfinger [at] cis.jku.at
Citizenship: Austrian
Research Interests:
Cognitive Situation Management, Situation Awareness, High-level Information Fusion, Artificial Intelligence,
Intelligent Information Systems, Software Engineering
Find me on: LinkedIn | ResearchGate | Mendeley | Scopus | Microsoft Academic Search | Google Scholar
I am a computer science researcher with a passion for applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to achieve high-level information fusion (HLIF). I enjoy experimenting with different approaches for developing intelligent computational systems, ranging from implementing deductive reasoning based on declarative knowledge structures (such as knowledge graphs) and logic-based approaches to AI, as well as inductive approaches in form of statistical/probabilistic approaches and machine learning. I am particularly interested in processing complex data, such as geo-spatial, relational, time series/temporal data, natural language texts, and graphs, and have acquired experience in social media mining and analysis of road traffic incident situations.
During my master's degree studies in Computer Science and Bioinformatics at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, I have acquired a broad background in different fields of computer science. I have been a Teaching Assistant for the courses Formal Verification and Model Checking (Prof. Armin Biere, Institute for Formal Verification), had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with Brain-Computer-Interfaces for character spelling and robot movement control in the course of a practicum at g-tec medial engineering, and have experimented with different Information Visualization strategies for browsing music file collections for my Bachelor's thesis at the Dept. of Computational Perception, and analyzing the results of matrix factorization methods on Genomics data for my Master's thesis at the Institute of Bioinformatics (Prof. Sepp Hochreiter; now Institute for Machine Learning). In the course of my PhD studies at the Institute for Telecooperation, I got attracted to the area of HLIF and cognitive situation management: Focusing on the problem of engineering intelligent systems supporting human control center operators' situation awareness, I have developed approaches for rule-based situation evolution tracking in road traffic control applications in the FFG-funded applied research project "Collaborative Situation Awareness in Road Traffic Control" (CSI), and soft fusion of human reports sensed from social media for crisis management in the FFG-funded applied research project "Crowd-sourced Situation Awareness for Crisis Management" (CrowdSA).
My current research interest revolves around computational situation assessment, which means to equip machines with capabilites not only to perceive individual elements of the environment, but to analzye their relations to understand the "big picture", i.e., the encountered situation(s). I have been awarded a Hertha-Firnberg grant by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) to pursue my ideas on Inductive Situation Evolution Modeling, which tackles the problem of how symbolic situation evolution models can be learned from existing situation datasets. In addition to pursuing my own research, I particularly enjoy actively engaging in the international scientific community to exchange on the latest advancements in this exciting field and support the organization of scientific forums. I am a member of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society's Technical Committee on Cognitive Situation Management, and have been serving in the Organizing Committee of the annual IEEE Conference of Cognitive and Computational Methods for Situation Management (CogSIMA) since 2018, which aims to bring together scientists from computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, modeling and simulation, robotics, systems engineering, and related areas to foster inter-disciplinary approaches to cognitive situation management.
I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate and exchange with researchers from various fields, so if you're interested in collaborating, please send me an e-mail or contact me on the social networks listed above!
Research Experience
FWF Hertha-Firnberg grant "Inductive Situation Evolution Modeling" [10/2018 - 01/2022], Postdoctoral Researcher / Principal Investigator
FFG Bridge project "Crowd-sourced Situation Awareness for Crisis Management" (CrowdSA) [09/2013 - 06/2016], PhD Researcher
FFG FIT-IT Semantic Systems project "Collaborative Situation Awareness in Road Traffic Control" (CSI) [10/2011 - 09/2014], PhD Researcher
Professional Experience
10/2018 - 01/2022: Hertha Firnberg Fellow / Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
03/2017 - 09/2017: Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
03/2015 - 02/2017: Senior Project Associate at the Department of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
03/2013 - 02/2015: Project Associate at the Department of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
03/2012 - 02/2013: Project Associate at the Institute of Bioinformatics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
10/2011 - 02/2012: Student Researcher at the Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
09/2009 - 12/2009: Practicum in Software Engineering, g-tec - medical engineering GmbH.
10/2008 - 01/2009: Teaching Assistant, Institute of Formal Methods, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
03/2007 - 06/2007: Teaching Assistant, Institute of Formal Methods, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
Education
12/2016 Dissertation: Staying aware in an evolving world: evolution support for situation awareness in control centers. [pdf]
Examiners:
Prof. Wieland Schwinger, Dept. of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Prof. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA, 2016.
08/2012 - 12/2016 Doctorate Studies in Technical Sciences, Degree: Dr.techn. (Ph.D.), with distinction
11/2008 - 11/2018 Master in Bioinformatics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
08/2012 Master Thesis: An R package for the visualization of the results of projection methods with applications in bioinformatics.
Supervisor: Prof. Sepp Hochreiter, Institute of Bioinformatics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
11/2008 - 08/2012 Master in Computer Science, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, Degree: Dipl.-Ing. (Master of Science)
11/2008 Bachelor Thesis: Multidimensional scaling and tag clouds: new approaches for browsing very large music collections.
Supervisor: Markus Schedl, Department of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
09/2004 - 11/2008 Bachelor Studies Computer Science, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, Degree: Bakk.techn. (Bachelor in Computer Science)
Scientific Community Service
Committee Member
Co-Chair of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society's Technical Committee on Cognitive Situation Management [since 10/2019]
Member of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society's Technical Committee on Cognitive Situation Management [since 2017]
Committee member of the IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA):
Organizing Committee member:
Technical Program Commitee member:
Program Committee member of the 2021 Conf. on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Reviewer for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
Associate Editor (Special Sessions: Cyber) for the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC):
Technical Program Committee member of the International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION):
Technical Program Committee member of the Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (TAAI):
Session Chair
Regular Session "Machine Learning for Human-Machine Interaction" at the 2021 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA)
Regular Session "Knowledge Acquisition in Intelligent Systems" at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC 2020), Oct. 13, 2020
Special Session "Computational Models of Cognition and Situated Behavior in Cyber-Physical-Human Systems" at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC'19)
Keynote Dr. Doug Riecken (AFOSR, USA), at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA)
Session "Ontologies and Reasoning" at the 2016 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA)
Journal Reviews
IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
IEEE Internet Computing Spotlight
Evolutionary Intelligence, Springer
Data, MDPI
Healthcare, MDPI
Honors/Awards
Best Paper Award at the 2015 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA)
Grants
FWF Hertha-Firnberg project "Inductive Situation Evolution Modeling" [10/2018 - 01/2022], funding volume € 230.010,00, approval rate 22%
Publication Record
non-peer reviewed
Book Chapters
Salfinger, A., Retschitzegger, W., Schwinger, W., and Pröll, B. (2016a). Towards a Crowd-Sensing Enhanced Situation Awareness System for Crisis Management. In Rogova, G. L. and Scott, P., editors, Fusion Methodologies in Crisis Management, pages 177-211. Springer International Publishing
peer-reviewed
Conference Proceedings
Rogova, G. L., Lebiere, C., Gundersen, O. E., Salfinger, A., and Baclawski, K., editors (2018). 2018 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA). IEEE
Journal Articles
Baumgartner, N., Mitsch, S., Müller, A., Retschitzegger, W., Salfinger, A., and Schwinger, W. (2014). A Tour of BeAware! - A Situation Awareness Framework for Control Centers. Information Fusion, 20:155-173
Conference Publications
Salfinger, A. and Snidaro, L. (2020): Towards Neural Situation Evolution Modeling: Learning a Distributed Representation for Predicting Complex Event Sequences. 23rd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION). ISIF, July 6-9, 2020
Salfinger, A. (2020). Reinforcement Learning Meets Cognitive Situation Management: A Review of Recent Learning Approaches from the Cognitive Situation Management Perspective. 2020 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA). Virtual Conference, 2020
Salfinger, A. (2019a). Framing Situation Prediction as a Sequence Prediction Problem: A Situation Evolution Model Based on Continuous-Time Markov Chains. In 2019 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, Canada. IEEE
Salfinger, A. (2019b). Situation Mining: Event Pattern Mining for Situation Model Induction. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA), Las Vegas, USA. IEEE
Girtelschmid, S., Salfinger, A., Pröll, B., Retschitzegger, W., and Schwinger, W. (2016a). Near Real-time Detection of Crisis Situations. In 2016 39th International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics, MIPRO, pages 247-252, Opatija, Croatia. IEEE
Salfinger, A., Schwinger, W., Retschitzegger, W., and Pröll, B. (2016b). Mining the Disaster Hotspots - Situation-Adaptive Crowd Knowledge Extraction for Crisis Management. In 2016 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support, CogSIMA 2016, pages 212-218, San Diego, CA, USA. IEEE
Salfinger, A., Retschitzegger, W., Schwinger, W., and Pröll, B. (2015b). crowdSA - Towards Adaptive and Situation-Driven Crowd-Sensing for Disaster Situation Awareness. In 2015 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support, CogSIMA 2015, pages 14-20, Orlando, FL, USA. IEEE
Salfinger, A., Girtelschmid, S., Pröll, B., Retschitzegger, W., and Schwinger, W. (2015a). Crowd-Sensing Meets Situation Awareness - A Research Roadmap for Crisis Management. In 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS-48, pages 153-162, Kauai, HI, USA. IEEE
Salfinger, A., Neidhart, D., Retschitzegger, W., Schwinger, W., and Mitsch, S. (2014a). SEM² Suite - Towards a Tool Suite for Supporting Knowledge Management in Situation Awareness Systems. In Joshi, J., Bertino, E., Thuraisingham, B., and Liu, L., editors, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, IEEE IRI 2014, pages 351-360, San Francisco, CA, USA. IEEE
Salfinger, A., Retschitzegger, W., and Schwinger, W. (2014b). Staying Aware in an Evolving World - Specifying and Tracking Evolving Situations. In 2014 IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support, CogSIMA 2014, pages 195-201, San Antonio, USA. IEEE
Salfinger, A., Retschitzegger, W., and Schwinger, W. (2013). Maintaining Situation Awareness Over Time - A Survey on the Evolution Support of Situation Awareness Systems. In 2013 Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, TAAI 2013, pages 274-281, Taipei, Taiwan. IEEE
Baumgartner, N., Mitsch, S., Müller, A., Retschitzegger, W., Salfinger, A., and Schwinger,W. (2012). The Situation Radar: Visualizing Collaborative Situation Awareness in Traffic Control Systems. In Proceedings of the 19th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), Vienna, Austria
Workshop Publications
Pollak, M., Salfinger, A., Hummel, K.A. (2022): Teaching Drones On The Fly: Can Emotional Feedback Serve as Learning Signal for Training Artificial Agents? Accepted at the AAAI-22 Workshop on Interactive Machine Learning (IML@AAAI’22).
Salfinger, A.: Deep Learning for Cognitive Load Monitoring: A Comparative Evaluation. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC ’20 Adjunct), September 12–16, 2020, Virtual Event, Mexico. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3410530.3414433
Salfinger, A., Salfinger, C., Pröll, B., Retschitzegger, W., and Schwinger, W. (2016b). Pinpointing the Eye of the Hurricane - Creating a Gold-Standard Corpus for Situative Geo-Coding of Crisis Tweets Based on Linked Open Data. In McCrae, J. P., Chiarcos, C., Montiel Ponsoda, E., Declerck, T., Osenova, P., and Hellmann, S., editors, Proceedings of the LREC 2016 Workshop "LDL 2016 - 5th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Managing, Building and Using Linked Language Resources", LDL 2016, pages 27-35, Portorož, Slovenia
Mitsch, S., Müller, A., Retschitzegger, W., Salfinger, A., and Schwinger, W. (2013). A Survey on Clustering Techniques for Situation Awareness. In Ishikawa, Y., Li, J., Wang, W., Zhang, R., and Zhang, W., editors, Web Technologies and Applications: 15th Asia-Paci c Web Conference, APWeb 2013, Sydney, Australia, April 4-6, 2013. Proceedings, volume 7808 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 815{826. Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Talks
Invited Lightning Talk "Challenges, Shared Tasks & Gyms: Lessons Learned from Other Communities?" at the Workshop on CogSIMA Challenge Problems, Virtual Workshop in conjunction with CogSIMA 2021, May 21, 2021
Paper Presentation "Deep Learning for Cognitive Load Monitoring: A Comparative Evaluation" at the 5th International Workshop on Smart & Ambient Notification and Attention Management (UbiTtention 2020), Virtual Workshop in conjunction with UbiComp/ISWC, Sept. 12, 2020
Paper Presentation "Reinforcement Learning Meets Cognitive Situation Management: A Review of Recent Learning Approaches from the Cognitive Situation Management Perspective" at the 2020 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA), Virtual Conference, Aug. 25, 2020
Paper Presentation "Towards Neural Situation Evolution Modeling: Learning a Distributed Representation for Predicting Complex Event Sequences" at the 23rd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Virtual Conference, July 9, 2020
Paper Presentation "Framing Situation Prediction as a Sequence Prediction Problem: A Situation Evolution Model Based on Continuous-Time Markov Chains" at the 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Ottawa, Canada, July 3, 2019
Paper Presentation "Situation Mining: Event Pattern Mining for Situation Model Induction" at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA), Las Vegas, NV, USA, April 9, 2019
Paper Presentation "Pinpointing the Eye of the Hurricane - Creating A Gold-Standard Corpus for Situative Geo-Coding of Crisis Tweets Based on Linked Open Data" at the LDL 2016 – 5th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Managing, Building and Using Linked Language Resources, Portorož, Slovenia, May 24, 2016
Paper Presentation "Mining the Disaster Hotspots - Situation-Adaptive Crowd Knowledge Extraction for Crisis Management" at the 2016 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA), San Diego, CA, USA, March 24, 2016
Paper Presentation "crowdSA - Towards Adaptive and Situation-Driven Crowd-Sensing for Disaster Situation Awareness" at the 2015 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA), Orlando, FL, USA, March 10, 2015
Paper Presentation "Crowd-Sensing Meets Situation Awareness - A Research Roadmap for Crisis Management" at the 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2015), Kauai, HI, USA, Jan. 6, 2015
Paper Presentation "SEM² Suite - Towards a Tool Suite for Supporting Knowledge Management in Situation Awareness Systems" at the IEEE 15th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IEEE IRI 2014), San Francisco, CA, USA, Aug. 14, 2014
Paper Presentation "Staying Aware in an Evolving World - Specifying and Tracking Evolving Situations" at the 2014 IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA) , San Antonio, TX, USA, March 5, 2014
Paper Presentation "Maintaining Situation Awareness Over Time - A Survey on the Evolution Support of Situation Awareness Systems" at the 2013 Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (TAAI 2013), Taipei, "Taiwan, Dec. 6, 2013
Paper Presentation "A Survey on Clustering Techniques for Situation Awareness" at the International Workshop on Management of Spatial Temporal Data (15th Asia-Pacific Web Conference), Sydney, Australia, April 6, 2013
Teaching Experience
Lecturer at the School of Engineering (Wels Campus), University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
summer term 2017, course "User-Generated Content Processing"
summer term 2016, courses "Introduction to Database Systems" and "User-Generated Content Processing"
Co-supervision of Bachelor theses at the Dept. of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz:
Sketching the Situational Picture - Implementation of a PreparednessRadar for First Responders (Markus Weißenbek, Berthold Roiser), Bachelor Thesis, 2017
A Flexible Data Ingestion and Information Fusion Framework for SAW Applications (Ovidiu-Cristian Iliesiu), Bachelor Thesis
Data Quality Analysis for Crowd-Sensed Crisis Situation Awareness (Alexander Porod), Bachelor Thesis
Mobile Applications for Crowd-Sensing Traffic Information – Transportation mode and free parking place detection (Harald Weiner), Bachelor Thesis
Mobile Applications for Crowd-Sensing Traffic Information – Segmentation based map matching and traffic flow analysis (Markus Niederkofler), Bachelor Thesis
Ontology Engineering for an Extensible SAW Framework Architecture (Martin Weber, Christoph Zimprich), Bachelor Thesis
A Multi-Touch Interface for Collaborative Situation Awareness (Philipp Kapfer), Bachelor Thesis, 2012
Co-supervision Project in Intelligent Information Systems (summer term 2017) at the Dept. of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz:
Traffic Situation Analysis (Berthold Roiser), Project in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
SEMEVAL 2017 TASK 8 - Rumor classification (David Graf), Project in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Co-supervision Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems (winter terms 2013/14 - 2016/17, summer term 2016 and 2017) at the Dept. of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz:
Automated Rumor Detection in Social Media (David Graf), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Ontology-Learning and the Pertinence of Social Media (Alexander Moser), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Effects and Detection of Social Botnets (Christian Huber), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Aerial Robotics and Image Analysis for Disaster Assessment (Franz Strasser), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Influencer Detection (Franziska Schaur), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Contextual Advertising (Michael Krieger), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Deep Learning for Text Understanding (Mario Kahlhofer), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Natural Language Understanding (Patrick Bonten), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2017
Geo-Information Extraction (Thomas Mandorfer), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2016
Topic Detection & Tracking in Social Media (Simon Woisetschläger), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2016
Predictive Modeling with Social Media Data (Raphael Mosaner), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2016
Crowd-sourcing Social Media Analysis (Philipp Schwarz), Seminar in Intelligent Information Systems, 2016
Who is Tweeting? User Account Classification on Twitter (Sinan Arnaut), Seminar Thesis, 2016
Generating Natural Language Descriptions for Images (Stefana Fratean), Seminar Thesis, 2016
Text Mining Techniques for Social Media Data (Mhd Mousa Hamad), Seminar Thesis, 2016
Complex Event Processing for SAW applications (Ilko Kovacic), Seminar Thesis, 2014
Integrating spatio-temporal Data Mining algorithms into SAW applications and frameworks (Melanie Donabauer, Carmen Lorenzoni), Seminar Thesis, 2014
A Mobile Application for Crowd Traffic Information Creation (Markus Niederkofler, Harald Weiner), Seminar Thesis, 2013
Supervision of twelve high school student internships in the course of four FFG TALENTE projects (grant no. 850859, 852071, 850855 and 850594) at the Dept. of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute for Telecooperation, and the Institute of Application-Oriented Knowledge Processsing, Johannes Kepler University Linz, in July and August 2015
Supervision of three high school student internships in the course of FFG TALENTE projects (grant no. 845561 and 845562) at the Dept. of Cooperative Information Systems, Institute of Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, summer 2014
Co-supervision of three high school student internships in the course of FFG TALENTE project 836870, at the Institute of Bioinformatics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, summer 2012
Teaching Assistant "Formal Methods" (summer term 2007) and "Model Checking" (winter term 2008/09) at the Institute of Formal Verification, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Skills
A selection of programming languages, tools & frameworks I have obtained practical experience with:
Java
R
Python
postgrSQL
postGIS
keras/tensorflow/PyTorch
Hibernate
ORM Tools (Visual Paradigm)
JBoss Drools
GATE
Matlab + Simulink
Mathematica