Welcome

In our new course, you take on a real-world innovation challenge in a small team and in collaboration with IBM and EnBW. You will build a working prototype for it, with IBM Bob as an AI development partner across the whole design & development lifecycle. Your job is to delegate the right tasks, question what the AI gives back, and take ownership of the result. Alongside the build, you reflect on how that collaboration actually went. Basics in programming are enough to start.

Maximilian Graf graduated from the DHBW Mannheim with a bachelor’s degree in Information System Engineering - Data Science and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) master’s in Information System Engineering. During his master’s, he focused on Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering and worked as an AI engineer at SAP. He will focus on applying AI under uncertainty and designing human-ai interaction.

Social media networks shape how information and opinions spread, from viral marketing to echo chambers and fake news. Review the research on latency and context switching, and design an interaction mechanism that keeps users focused while the agent works. Today's AI systems are interactive, show their steps, and let users steer, but do these interactions make us stop and think or do the contrary?

At last week's Days of Democracy in Karlsruhe, Julian Benz presented our EKILED project — explainable AI that helps students and educators recognise digital disinformation. The poster led to valuable feedback and good discussions with fellow researchers.

All partners of the BMFTR-funded project EKILED met in Ulm this week for the official kick-off workshop. The project aims to make AI-based disinformation detection transparent and educationally accessible. Researchers from KIT’s Information Systems IV DPS group contribute an interactive explainability component to help users learn from and with the AI system. The consortium coordinated initial activities and laid the foundation for collaboration until the project’s completion in 2029.

We are excited to kick off the summer semester with Digital Services: Foundations, offered by the Research Group Information Systems IV - Digital Platform & Services at the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) and lectured by Prof. Maximilian Förster. Starting this summer semester, the course takes students on a deep dive into the fundamentals, innovation methods, analytics, and trends in the realm of digital services today. While the course has a history at our institute, the content has been thoroughly revamped to reflect the latest developments in the field — and we are genuinely looking forward to exploring it together with our students.

An application-oriented research project at the intersection of social impact and Explainable AI has officially launched: the BMFTR-funded project EKILED (Erklärbare KI zum Lernen über digitale Desinformation) aims to make AI systems for detecting disinformation more transparent and educationally valuable.

Against the backdrop of growing challenges posed by digital disinformation in today’s interconnected public sphere, EKILED focuses on advancing Explainable AI approaches to open up the “black box” of complex AI models. The goal is to help users—particularly students—understand how and why AI systems classify content as disinformation, and which patterns they rely on in doing so.

We are pleased to announce that as of April 1, 2026, Professor Dr. Maximilian Förster has started his position as Junior Professor and Head of the Research Group Information Systems IV - Digital Platform & Services at the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) at KIT. The junior professorship is sponsored by IBM in addition to its engagement within the Karlsruhe Digital Service Research & Innovation (KSRI) Hub.