Digitale Technologien verändern Gesellschaften und die Welt der Menschen, die in ihnen leben. Insbesondere Big Data und KI bzw. das maschinelle Lernen stehen dabei mit vielfältigen Potenzialen in Verbindung. Die zunehmende Nutzung daten-intensiver Innovationen wirft zugleich aber auch Fragen auf, in welcher (technisierten) Gesellschaft wir leben wollen und welche Regeln die Forschung und Entwicklung entsprechender Technologien anleiten soll. Vor diesem Hintergrund gibt das Seminar einen Überblick zu Themen der sogenannten Daten- und KI-Ethik, die sich in den letzten Jahren als eigenes Forschungsfeld etabliert hat.

Nach einer praxisnahen Einführung in die Grundlagen der ethischen Urteilsbildung für Computerwissenschaftler*innen werden Schlüsselkonzepte der Daten- und KI-Ethik erarbeitet (z.B. »vertrauenswürdige KI«, »algorithmische Diskriminierung«, »Datensouveränität«) und auf ausgewählte Praxisfelder (z.B. medizinische Diagnostik; soziale Robotik; autonomes Fahren) angewandt. Neben der Reflexion auf die ethischen und gesellschaftlichen Dimensionen der Anwendung von daten-intensiven Technologien sollen forschungsethische Kompetenzen (z.B. Anforderungen für gelungene Ethikanträge) sowie Grundsätze der verantwortungsvollen und guten wissenschaftlichen Praxis vermittelt werden.

Kursbild by Alan Warburton / © BBC / Better Images of AI / Quantified Human / CC-BY 4.0

In this seminar we will focus on the decision-making hurdles (challenges) that users face in making complex privacy and security decisions online (Web) with respect to sharing sensitive personal information. For instance, with the advent of GDPR legislation, web applications were required to integrate clear messages to obtain explicit user consent regarding the use of cookies (or other tracking tools), the types of information being collected, and planned usage objectives. However, while organisations like Statistica indicate that web application users are concerned about the disclosure of their sensitive personal data, studies also indicate that many users feel overwhelmed and that they really do not have a choice except to "Accept" if they wish to use these web applications. 

Our goal during this seminar will be to implement and experiment with some existing automated techniques to aid users in making more proactive and "better" privacy and security choices. We will study these techniques from both the protective and adversarial perspective, in the sense that oftentimes tools that are designed to support "better" privacy and/or security choices, can also be exploited to achieve the opposite effect. For instance, research shows that most users never change default settings on web applications. Automated privacy-friendly defaults can support users by providing some baseline privacy settings. However, several application providers also take advantage of this to encourage users to install unnecessary third party applications that disclose personal information for the application provider's benefit.

What we will do...

In the first phase of the semester leading up to the mid-semester presentation, each team will select a protective privacy and/or security mechanism which they will implement. The goal is to proactively support users in  making "better" decisions to protect their personal information while using web applications. Following the mid-semester presentation, in the second phase of the semester leading up to the final presentation, each team will modify the approach they designed in the first phase in order to deliberately (adversarially) collect personal information from users. Each team will then test both the proactive and adversarial approaches with a group of 6 -10 users of your choice, to determine if the behaviours "learnt" from the supportive mechanisms actually do provide longterm protective benefits.


Software applications have become an integral part of daily life, sharing information across devices pervasively and seamlessly to conduct and ever growing number of computing operations. One of the results of software application ubiquity is the complexity of designing and maintaining these applications in ways that guarantee security in addition to reliability and availability. Main stream press examples of data and application breaches such as the case of the MyFitnessPal security breach in 2018 that resulted in hackers acquiring the private data of more than 150 million users, underline the importance of secure design and coding. The goal of this course therefore, is to learn how to identify, fix, and prevent security vulnerabilities.

In order to achieve this, we will study the principles, methods, and approaches needed for the development of secure applications such as web, mobile, and classic applications. This will be achieved through a series of twice weekly lectures during the summer semester, focused on studying methods of analysing software applications to identify and analyse vulnerability classes and corresponding attack vectors on a theoretical as well as practical level


Geschäftsprozesse sind allgegenwärtig. Wir nehmen an Prozessen teil, wenn wir Produkte bei Onlineshops bestellen, wenn wir uns immatrikulieren oder eine Busreise per App buchen. Software nimmt bei der Automatisierung der Prozesse immer größeren Raum ein.

In dieser Vorlesung werden Informationssysteme untersucht, mit denen Geschäftsprozesse analysiert und automatisiert werden können. Dazu behandeln wir Modellierungssprachen und entsprechende Softwarearchitekturen. Darüber hinaus werden Möglichkeiten zur Analyse von Prozessen und Grundlagen des Process Mining thematisiert. Weil Entscheidungen im Kontext von Prozessen immer wichtiger werden, haben wir den Bereich Entscheidungsmanagement in die Vorlesung aufgenommen. Dafür ist der Modellierungsanteil zurückgegangen. Die erlernten Techniken werden in Übungen angewendet.

Business processes management is the prime method for managing the operations of an enterprise. Thereby, information systems are employed to implement, monitor, and improve processes.
In the lecture "Business Process Intelligence," you will learn about well-established techniques in business process management as well as the newest developments in research and academia. Topics include modeling processes and decisions, verification and compliance checking, and process mining.