Hi there, we are the Human-Centered AI-based Systems (HAIS)-Lab.

We perform research at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Human-Computer Interaction, and Educational Technology. Specifically, we design, develop and investigate the effects of novel educational tools that enable highly individualized learning with the goal to support skill transfer and to prepare students for future learning.

We are located in the beautiful city of Bern in Switzerland and based at Bern University of Applied Sciences.

As part of our research, we have developed adaptive argumentation writing support systems that help individuals to develop better writing and reasoning skills (Link to CHI 2020 or ACL 2022 paper). Also, we built an intelligent conversational agent that provides students with adaptive and individual argumentation tutoring while writing persuasive essays independent of an instructor, time or location (Link to CHI 2021 paper). Moreover, we designed an empathy writing support tool by modeling the cognitive and emotional empathy structures in student-written texts (Link to ACL 2021 or CHI 2022 paper).

We believe in the power of collaboration for building better AI-based systems. If you are interested in our work, please contact us via Email.

---

Selected Publications

• Wambsganss, T., Janson, A., & Leimeister, J. M. (2022): Enhancing Argumentative Writing With Automated Feedback and Social Comparison Mudging. Computers & Education, Volume 191, 2022, Article 104644. PDF
• Wambsganss, T., Söllner, M., Koedinger, K., & Leimeister, J. M. (2022): Adaptive Empathy Learning Support in Peer Review Scenarios. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’22), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA . PDF
• Wambsganss, T., & Niklaus, C. (2022): Modeling Persuasive Discourse to Adaptively Support Students’ Argumentative Writing In The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022) . PDF
• Wambsganss, T., Niklaus, C., Söllner, M., Handschuh, S., & Leimeister, J. M. (2021): Supporting Cognitive and Emotional Empathic Writing of Students. In The Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) . PDF
• Wambsganss, T.; Küng, T.; Matthias, S. & Leimeister, J. M. (2021): ArgueTutor: An Adaptive Dialog-Based Learning System for Argumentation Skills In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems PDF
• Wambsganss, T., Höch, A., Zierau, N., & Söllner, M. 2021. Ethical Design of Conversational Agents: Towards Principles for a Value-Sensitive Design. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI). PDF
• Wambsganss, T., Niklaus, C., Cetto, M., Söllner, M., Handschuh, S., & Leimeister, J. M. (2020). AL: An adaptive learning support system for argumentation skills. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14). PDF
• Wambsganss, T., Winkler, R., Söllner, M., & Leimeister, J. M. (2020). A Conversational Agent to Improve Response Quality in Course Evaluations. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-9). PDF

---

Natively Developed Systems

We have designed, developed and scientifically evaluated various prototypes based on different technologies such as Flask, TensorFlow, FastText, PyTorch, Keras, SpaCy or Scikit-Learn.

	ArgueLearn an adaptive argumentation writing support tool based on artificial intelligence (Info)
	ArgueTutor a chatbot for individual argumentation tutoring (Info)
	ArgumentFeedback a Google Docs Add-on for argumentative writing support on business or project pitches (Info)
	Eva - a course evaluation bot a chatbot for personal course evaluations in large-scale or distance-learning scenarios (Info)

---

Collaborate

If you are interested in an internship or thesis, please sent your CV and your short motivation to haielab-info@gmail.com.

We believe in the power of collaboration for building better AI-based systems. If you are interested in my work, please contact us via Email.