BICISEDU Project

Basic Information

Partners: University of Economics in Bratislava – Faculty of Economic Informatics – responsible person Dr. Miroslav Hudec, Bifröst University Iceland – responsible person Dr. Hanna Kristin Skaftadottir.

Duration: The official start is September 1, 2023, and the end is August 31, 2024.

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Project Description

The project's primary purpose is cooperation in the emerging fields of business intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence. Its positive and negative impacts should be evaluated and documented for the benefit of education and society.

This goal will be realized through short research visits, improved study materials, publicity activities, and preparation of topics for master theses at the University of Economics in Bratislava and Bifrost University.

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Project Objectives

The project's primary purpose is to improve the already established bilateral cooperation to a higher level in the emerging fields of teaching and research in business intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence, as well as the impact of these two concepts on society and education.

One of the objectives is also the participation of Ph.D. students and young researchers. On the Slovak side, we included mainly women, as there is a need for more women in (explainable) artificial intelligence and business intelligence.

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Tasks and their Realization

Workshops and Conferences

The first meeting was held in week 20.11.-24.11. 2023 in Bratislava on the premises of the Faculty of Economic Informatics.

This week, Assistant Professor Jon Fryer Jonsson gave a talk at the TIESS conference co-organized by the University of Economics in Bratislava, Faculty of Economic Informatics, and Óbuda University Budapest. More information https://tiees.webconf.online/index.php/tiees-2023

One day was a conference: Methods and Technologies for Knowledge Extraction from Data for Economic Practice in Bratislava, where project team members gave their respective talks. More information https://fhi.euba.sk/www_write/files/aktuality/2023/pozv%C3%A1nka_workshop-sshi_eng.pdf

During the project workshop, we discussed our tasks and created a basis for outputs (e.g., agreeing on the final structure of the survey and improving the study materials).

The second meeting was held in week 22.4 -26.4.2024 in Reykjavik on the premises of the Bifröst University.

The first topic was reflecting on the improved study materials in the Business intelligence course (held in the autumn semester). The next topic was evaluating the ongoing improvements of study materials in the remaining courses in the spring semester.

We also discussed the initial findings from our survey, the lessons learned, surprising answers, and how to summarize all relevant findings into the journal article.

Meanwhile, our proposal for a small six-month grant in the mentioned COST initiative related to the synergy of statistical and XAI approaches in explaining data for practice in p2p lending has been accepted (see Publicity). Thus, we discussed how to proceed with the work.

Finally, we discussed the accepted articles for our special session at the ICEIS conference and chairing them by our Fenech colleague (see Publicity).

The third meeting was held in week 10.6.-14.6. 2024 in Bratislava on the premises of the Faculty of Economic Informatics.

Firstly, we focused on evaluating survey results, sharing new ideas and topics in BI and AI, working on journal article, and discussing how students reacted to improvements in our courses.

We also evaluated the ongoing work in our small grant in the frame of the mentioned COST initiative.

Our special guest was Prof. Francisco Javier Fernandez from the Public University of Navarra, Spain. This initiative supported an expert from the University of Fribourg, Prof. Edy Portmann. Four researchers from the University of Belgrade (partners in the bilateral Serbian-Slovak project supported by our respective national research agencies) also participated.

Thus, the next session was related to cooperation with our Serbian partners, namely how to invite them into the survey, i.e., to launch it at their university to have results from three countries, which is more relevant for a top-tiered journal.

Finally, we discussed ethnicity, sustainability, and other vital issues in XAI with all participants, which education should address.

The fourth meeting was held in weeks 26.8-30.8, 2024, in Reykjavik, on the premises of Bifröst University headquarters.

We finalized the journal article and sent it to the review process into the ranked Q2 in WoS journal.

We also evaluated the work in our small grant, awarded in the framework of the mentioned COST initiative, and worked on finalizing it.

We held a symposium in Reykjavík, a joint venture of COST Fintech/AI and BISICEDU. It was a two-day symposium that offered insight into fintech/AI, and we had multiple presentations and participants.

All participants agreed that the initiative was beneficial for both sides. In addition, our publicity on the TIESS conference, cooperation between Swiss and Spanish scientists, invitation of partners from Serbia, and merging the workshop with the COST Action CA19130 meeting enhanced the visibility of this initiative.  

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Survey

The survey was devoted to students’ perceptions of AI in education and in supporting life at the universities. For instance, in which fields they prefer AI, in which they are afraid of AI, whether they prefer mandatory lectures and seminars of AI, and the like.

The survey was launched at the Faculty of Economic Informatics and Bifröst University. The main findings and recommendations were summarized. Meanwhile, our Serbian partner from another project (see part Publicity) joined this task. Partner launched the survey at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade. Consequently, we examined results in three countries and prepared a journal manuscript.

Study Material Improvements

Our project online meetings and workshops launched ideas for improving our study materials.

Autumn semester

Business Intelligence

We improved the part related to the visualization of BI reporting by XAI and the life cycles of BI solutions. Materials are in Moodle.

https://moodle.euba.sk/pluginfile.php/23783/mod_resource/content/3/P8_vizualizaciaNew.pdf

https://moodle.euba.sk/pluginfile.php/23957/mod_resource/content/4/P11_zivotny%20cyklus.pdf

Spring semester

Knowledge Management Technologies

We improved part related to the data visualization and summarization by short quantified sentences of natural language for Erasmus students

https://moodle.euba.sk/course/view.php?id=497

Knowledge discovery in data by computational intelligence

We improved part related to cooperation of statistical figures and fuzzy logic in explaining statistical figures linguistically, i.e., why there is a small or high difference in correlation between attributes.

https://moodle.euba.sk/course/view.php?id=496

New Topics for Master Theses

Topics related to the application of business intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence are added to our Academic Information System:

The role of cognitive computational intelligence in the business environment

Importance of ontologies in contemporary artificial intelligence

Searching the solution for the Sudoku game by the CSP methods

Mixed logic aggregation functions for data evaluation in considering semantic uncertainty

Lectures to Students

Within this project, several lectures were given to students:

For students at the Faculty of Economic Informatics:

Assistant Professor, Hanna Kristin Skaftadóttir - Ethics and safety of AI April 10, 2014

Assistant Professor, Hanna Kristin Skaftadóttir - Synthesia.io: Introduction to a ground-breaking platform April 17, 2024

For students at the Bifrost University

Eva Rakovská, Ph.D.  Cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence application in business – agreed for the future.

Journal Article

The manuscript related to AI in education at our respective universities has been sent to the review process in journal ranked as Q2 in WoS.  

Publicity

Assistant Professor Hanna Kristin Skaftadóttir attended the COST Action CA19130 FinAI meeting in Istanbul May 20th, where she presented our initiative.

Assistant Professor Hanna Kristin Skaftadóttir organized project Workshop together with the COST Action CA19130 FinAI meeting in Reykjavik in August 2024.

Dr. Miroslav Hudec organized a workshop on this initiative linked with the seminar related to the international project SK-SRB-23-0007 Perspectives, issues, and synergy of Interpolative Boolean Algebra and Ordinal sums of conjunctive and disjunctive functions in classification granted by the Slovak Research and Development Agency, also related to computational intelligence, from mathematical perspective and applications.

Further Achievements beyond the Planned Ones

The principal investigators of both universities initiated the special session related to XAI for smart communities considering ethnicity (Soft Computing in Ethicity and Smart Cities Services—SEC-SCIS 2024) at the ICEIS 2024 conference indexed in WoS. Miroslav Hudec was the session co-chair, and Hanna Kristin Skaftadóttir was a programme committee member.

With the significant support of Hanna Kristin Skaftadóttir, Miroslav Hudec has applied as a principal investigator for the VMG grant in the frame of COST Action CA19130: E-COST-GRANT-CA19130-453dc334 (1.3.2024 - 31.8.2024) The synergy of statistical approaches and fuzzy logic approaches in mining patterns from p2p loan data. The other participants were from six countries (Hungary, France, Italy, Serbia, Turkey and Poland). Results were finished on time and sent to the committee members for evaluation. 

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