About me

Dominik Kowald

Dr. Dominik Kowald is a post-doctoral researcher in the Social Computing research area at the Know-Center, Austria's leading research center for data-driven business and big data analytics. He has a PhD. (with hons), MSc. (with hons) and BSc. in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology, and before that was attending the College of Industrial Engineering specialising in Manufacturing Computer Science (BULME Graz). He has finished his PhD in October 2017 in the course of the European-funded research projects Learning Layers and AFEL on cognitive-inspired recommender systems for social tagging and microblogging environments. Apart from that, he was working in several other industry-driven and European-funded research projects such as Organic Lingua and MoreGrasp. His research interests are in the fields of recommender systems, social tagging and microblogging systems, information retrieval, Big Data, Data Science, Open Science and complex network analytics. Full cv ( .pdf) and dissertation summary ( .pdf).

Selected publications (last five years)

  • Hasani-Mavriqi, I., Kowald, D., Helic, D., & Lex, E. (2018). Consensus Dynamics in Online Collaboration Systems. Computational Social Networks Journal. SpringerOpen. ( .pdf)
  • Kowald, D., Pujari, S., & Lex, E. (2017). Temporal Effects on Hashtag Reuse in Twitter: A Cognitive-Inspired Hashtag Recommendation Approach. In Proceedings of the 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'2017). ACM. ( .pdf)
  • Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2016). The Influence of Frequency, Recency and Semantic Context on the Reuse of Tags in Social Tagging Systems. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'2016). ACM. ( .pdf)
  • Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2015). Evaluating Tag Recommender Algorithms in Real-World Folksonomies: A Comparative Study. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys'2015). ACM. ( .pdf) ( poster)
  • Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Trattner, C., & Ley, T. (2014). Long Time no See: The Probability of Reusing Tags as a Function of Frequency and Recency. In Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd international conference on World wide web companion (WWW'2014), pp. 463-468. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. ( .pdf)


Publications

Please also have a look at my GoogleScholar, DBLP, ACM DL, Mendeley and ResearchGate profiles.

Journal articles, books and chapters

  1. Hasani-Mavriqi, I., Kowald, D., Helic, D., & Lex, E. (2018). Consensus Dynamics in Online Collaboration Systems. Computational Social Networks Journal. SpringerOpen. ( .pdf)
  2. Kowald, D. (2017). Modeling Activation Processes in Human Memory for Tag Recommendations: Using Models from Human Memory Theory to Implement Recommender Systems for Social Tagging and Microblogging Environments. Suedwestdeutscher Verlag fuer Hochschulschriften. ISBN: 978-620-2-32072-6. ( .pdf)
  3. Seitlinger, P., Ley, T., Kowald, D., Theiler, D., Hasani-Mavriqi, I., Dennerlein, S., Lex, E., & Albert, D. (2017). Balancing the Fluency-Consistency Tradeoff in Collaborative Information Search with a Recommender Approach. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). ( .pdf)
  4. Kopeinik, S., Kowald, D., Hasani-Mavriqi, I., & Lex, E. (2017). Improving Collaborative Filtering Using a Cognitive Model of Human Category Learning. The Journal of Web Science (JWS). Vol. 2, No 4, pp 45 - 61 ( .pdf)
  5. Trattner, C., Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Kopeinik, S., & Ley, T. (2016). Modeling Activation Processes in Human Memory to Predict the Reuse of Tags. The Journal of Web Science (JWS). Vol. 2, No. 1, pp 1 – 18. ( .pdf)
  6. Santos, P., Dennerlein, S., Theiler, D., Cook, J., Treasure-Jones, T., Holley, D., Kerr, M., Attwell, G., Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2016) Going beyond your personal learning network, using recommendations and trust through a multimedia question-answering service for decision-support: A case study in the healthcare. Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS). ISSN 0948-695X. ( .pdf)
  7. Kowald, D., Kopeinik, S., Seitlinger, P., Ley, T., Albert, D., & Trattner, C. (2015). Refining Frequency-Based Tag Reuse Predictions by Means of Time and Semantic Context. In Mining, Modeling, and Recommending'Things' in Social Media (pp. 55-74). Springer International Publishing. ( .pdf)
  8. Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Kopeinik, S., Ley, T., & Trattner, C. (2015). Forgetting the Words but Remembering the Meaning: Modeling Forgetting in a Verbal and Semantic Tag Recommender. In Mining, Modeling, and Recommending'Things' in Social Media (pp. 75-95). Springer International Publishing. ( .pdf)
  9. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Eberhard, L., Trattner, C., Parra, D., & Marinho, L. B. (2015). Utilizing Online Social Network and Location-Based Data to Recommend Products and Categories in Online Marketplaces. In Mining, Modeling, and Recommending'Things' in Social Media (pp. 96-115). Springer International Publishing. ( .pdf)

Conference papers

  1. Kowald, D., Kopeinik, S., & Lex, E. (2017). The TagRec Framework as a Toolkit for the Development of Tag-Based Recommender Systems. In Adjunct Publication of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adapation and Personalization (UMAP'2017). ACM. ( .pdf) ( poster)
  2. Kowald, D., Pujari, S., & Lex, E. (2017). Temporal Effects on Hashtag Reuse in Twitter: A Cognitive-Inspired Hashtag Recommendation Approach. In Proceedings of the 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'2017). ACM. ( .pdf)
  3. Kopeinik, S., Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2016). Which Algorithms Suit Which Learning Environments? A Comparative Study of Recommender Systems in TEL. In Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'2016). Springer. ( .pdf)
  4. Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2016). The Influence of Frequency, Recency and Semantic Context on the Reuse of Tags in Social Tagging Systems. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'2016). ACM. ( .pdf)
  5. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2016). High Enough? Explaining and Predicting Traveler Satisfaction in Airline Reviews. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'2016). ACM. ( .pdf)
  6. Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2015). Evaluating Tag Recommender Algorithms in Real-World Folksonomies: A Comparative Study. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys'2015). ACM. ( .pdf) ( poster)
  7. Seitlinger, P., Kowald, D., Kopeinik, S., Hasani-Mavriqi, I., Ley, T., & Lex, E. (2015). Attention Please! A Hybrid Resource Recommender Mimicking Attention-Interpretation Dynamics. In Proceedings of the companion publication of the 24th international conference on World wide web companion (WWW'2015). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. ( .pdf)
  8. Kowald, D. (2015). Modeling Cognitive Processes in Social Tagging to Improve Tag Recommendations. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (WWW'2015), pp. 505-509. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. (PhD Symposium) ( .pdf)
  9. Dennerlein, S., Kowald, D., Lex, E., Theiler, D., Lacic, E., & Ley, T. (2015). The Social Semantic Server: A Flexible Framework to Support Informal Learning at the Workplace. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven Business(i-Know'2015). ACM. ( .pdf)
  10. Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Trattner, C., & Ley, T. (2014). Long Time no See: The Probability of Reusing Tags as a Function of Frequency and Recency. In Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd international conference on World wide web companion (WWW'2014), pp. 463-468. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. ( .pdf)
  11. Seitlinger, P., Kowald, D., Trattner, C., & Ley, T. (2013). Recommending tags with a model of human categorization. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on information & knowledge management (CIKM'2013), pp. 2381-2386. ACM. ( .pdf)

Poster and demo papers

  1. Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Ley, T., & Lex, E. (2018). The Impact of Semantic Context Cues on the User Acceptance of Tag Recommendations: An Online Study. In Companion Proceedings of the 27th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'2018). ACM. ( .pdf) ( poster)
  2. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Traub, M., Luzhnica, G., Simon, J., & Lex, E. (2015). Tackling Cold-Start Users in Recommender Systems with Indoor Positioning Systems. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys'2015). CEUR-WS. ( .pdf) ( poster)
  3. Traub, M., Kowald, D., Lacic, E., Schoen, P., Supp, G., & Lex, E. (2015). Smart booking without looking: providing hotel recommendations in the TripRebel portal. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven Business (i-Know'2015). ACM. (best demo honourable mention). ( .pdf) ( poster)
  4. Kowald, D., Lacic, E., & Trattner, C. (2014). TagRec: towards a standardized tag recommender benchmarking framework. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM conference on Hypertext and social media (HT'2014) ,pp. 305-307). ACM. (best poster award). ( .pdf) ( poster)
  5. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., & Trattner, C. (2014). SocRecM: a scalable social recommender engine for online marketplaces. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM conference on Hypertext and social media (HT'2014), pp. 308-310. ACM. ( .pdf) ( poster)
  6. Kowald, D., Dennerlein, S., Dieter, T., Walk, S. & Trattner, C. (2013). The Social Semantic Server - A Framework to Provide Services on Social Semantic Network Data. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Semantic Systems (i-Semantics'2013). CEUR-WS. ( .pdf) ( poster)

Workshop papers, newsletters and extended abstracts

  1. Lex, E., Ross-Hellauer, T., & Kowald, D. (2018). Recommender Systems as Enabling Technology to Interlink Scholarly Information. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Researcher Centric Scholarly Communication co-located with the 27th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'2018). ACM. ( link)
  2. D'Aquin, M., Kowald, D., Fessl, A., Lex, E., & Thalmann, S. (2018). AFEL - Analytics for Everyday Learning. In Proceedings of the International Projects Track co-located with the 27th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'2018). ACM. ( .pdf)
  3. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Reiter-Haas, M., Slawicek, V., & Lex, E. (2018). Beyond Accuracy Optimization: On the Value of Item Embeddings for Student Job Recommendations. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Multi-dimensional Information Fusion for User Modeling and Personalization (IFUP'2018) co-located with the 11th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'2018). ( .pdf)
  4. Kowald, D. (2017). Modeling Activation Processes in Human Memory to Improve Tag Recommendations. SIGIR Forum December 2017, Volume 51, Number 3 (dissertation abstract). ACM. ( .pdf)
  5. Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2017). Overcoming the Imbalance Between Tag Recommendation Approaches and Real-World Folksonomy Structures with Cognitive-Inspired Algorithms. European Symposium on Computational Social Science (ESCSS'2017). ( .pdf) ( poster)
  6. D'Aquin, M., Adamou, A., Dietze, S., Fetahu, B., Gadiraju, U., Hasani-Mavriqi, I., Holtz, P., Kimmerle, J., Kowald, D., Lex, E., Lopez.Sola, S., Maturana, R., Sabol, V., Troullinou, P., & Veas, E. (2017). AFEL: Towards Measuring Online Activities Contributions to Self-directed Learning. In Proceedings of Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning (ARTEL) in conjunction with the 12th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning: Adaptive and Adaptable Learning (EC-TEL 2017) ( .pdf)
  7. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2017). Tailoring Recommendations for a Multi-Domain Environment. Workshop on Workshop on Intelligent Recommender Systems by Knowledge Transfer & Learning (RecSysKTL'2017) co-location with the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys'2017). ( .pdf)
  8. Traub, M., Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Kahr, M., & Lex, E. (2016). Need Help? Recommending Social Institutions. Workshop on Recommender Systems and Big Data Analytics (RSBDA'2016) co-location with i-KNOW'2016. ( .pdf)
  9. Lacic, E., Traub, M., Kowald, D., & Lex, E. (2015). ScaR: Towards a Real-Time Recommender Framework Following the Microservices Architecture. Workshop on Large Scale Recommender Systems (LSRS'2015) co-located with the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys'2015). ( .pdf)
  10. Trattner, C., Kowald, D., & Lacic, E. (2015). TagRec: Towards a Toolkit for Reproducible Evaluation and Development of Tag-Based Recommender Algorithms. SIGWEB Newsletter. Winter 2015. ( .pdf)
  11. Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Ley, T., & Lex, E. (2015). Modeling Activation Processes in Human Memory to Improve Tag Recommendations. 2nd GESIS Computational Social Sciences Winter Symposium (CSSWS’2015). ( .pdf) ( poster)
  12. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Seitlinger, P., Trattner, C. & Parra, D. (2014). Recommending Items in Social Tagging Systems Using Tag and Time Information, In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Social Personalisation (SP'2014) co-located with the 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'2014). CEUR-WS. ( .pdf)
  13. Lacic, E., Kowald, D., Parra, D., Kahr, M., & Trattner, C. (2014). Towards a scalable social recommender engine for online marketplaces: The case of apache solr. In Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd international conference on World wide web companion (WWW'2014), pp. 817-822. Workshop on Social Recommender Systems: SRS'2014. ( .pdf)

Proceedings as editor

  1. Alexander Felfernig, Ralf Klamma, Tobias Ley, Dominik Kowald, Elisabeth Lex, & Viktoria Pammer-Schindler (2017). Focused topic on "Recommender systems and social network analysis" in Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS). Volume 23. Issue 9. ( link)
  2. Mario Aehnelt, Olivia Bluder, Gert Breitfuss, Rene Kaiser, Roman Kern, Ralf Klamma, Dominik Kowald, Tobias Ley, Elisabeth Lex, Christiana Müller, Viktoria Pammer-Schindler, Romana Rauter, Gerald Reiner, & Eduardo Veas (2017). Proceedings of the Workshop Papers of i-Know 2017, Graz, Austria, October 11-12, 2017. ( link)

Theses

  1. Kowald, D. (2017). Modeling Activation Processes in Human Memory to Improve Tag Recommendations. PhD thesis. ( .pdf)
  2. Kowald, D. (2012). Combining Computer-Supported, Collaborative Learning with E-Assessment: Enhancing a Wiki System with Flexible Assessment Methods. Master thesis. ( .pdf)
  3. Kowald, D., & Maderer, J. (2009). Peer Assessment in Computer Science and Modern Technologies to Build a Flexible E-Learning System around it. Bachelor thesis. ( .pdf)


Services

Organization

  • RSBDA'2017, Second Workshop on Recommender Systems and Big Data Analytics co-located with i-KNOW 2017, Graz, Austria, 2017. ( link)
  • RSBDA'2016, First Workshop on Recommender Systems and Big Data Analytics co-located with i-KNOW 2016, Graz, Austria, 2016. ( link)

Programm committee membership and reviewing

  • UMAP'2018, 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, Singapore, Singapore, 2018 ( link)
  • SoAPS'2018, Workshop on Social Aspects in Personalization and Search co-located with ECIR'2018 conference, Grenoble, France, 2018 ( link)
  • SNAM Journal, Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2018 ( link)
  • INRT Journal, Information Retrieval Journal, 2018 ( link)
  • TLT Journal, Transactions on Learning Technologies, 2017 ( link)
  • SNAMS'2017, The Fourth International Symposium on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security, Prague, Czech Rebublic ( link)
  • WebScience'2017, 9th International ACM Web Science Conference, Troy, New York, 2017 ( link)
  • OpenSym'2017, 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, Galway, Ireland, 2017 ( link)
  • SNAM Journal, Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2017 ( link)
  • Computers & Education Journal, 2017 ( link)
  • MSM'2015, 6th International Workshop on Modeling Social Media - Behavioral Analytics in Social Media, Big Data and the Web co-located with WWW’2015 conference, Florence, Italy, 2015 ( link)
  • i-Know'2015, Social Computing track of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business, Graz, Austria, 2015 ( link)
  • UMAP'2014, 22nd Conference on User Modelling, Adaption and Personalization, Aalborg, Denmark, 2014 ( link)
  • EC-TEL'2014, 9th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Graz, Austria, 2014 ( link)
  • i-Know'2013, Science 2.0 track of the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business, Graz, Austria, 2013 ( link)

Talks and presentations

  • WWW'2018, Poster session of the 27th International World Wide Web Conference in Lyon, France. ( poster)
  • ESCSS'2017, Algorithms and poster sessions of the First European Symposium on Computational Social Science in London, Great Britain. ( slides) ( poster)
  • PhD Defense, PhD defense presentation at Graz University of Technology, Austria. ( slides)
  • UMAP'2017, Late-Breaking-Results poster session of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaption and Personalization in Bratislava, Slovakia. ( poster)
  • WWW'2017, Data Mining session of the 26th International World Wide Web Conference in Perth, Australia. ( slides)
  • HT'2016, Social Media Analytics session of the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media in Halifax, Canada (with travel grant). ( slides)
  • CSSWS'2015, Pecha Kucha and poster session of the 2nd Computational Social Sciences Winter Symposium, Cologne, Germany. ( poster)
  • RecSys’2015, Short Paper slam and poster session of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Vienna, Austria. ( poster)
  • WWW'2015, PhD Symposium of the 24th International World Wide Web Conference, Florence, Italy. ( slides)
  • i-Know'2015, Demo session of 15th Int. Conference on Knowledge Technologies, Graz, Austria. ( poster)
  • WWW'2014, WebScience track of the 23rd International World Wide Web Conference, Seoul, Korea. ( slides)
  • SRS'2014, Workshop on Social Recommender Systems @ WWW’2014 conference, Seoul, Korea. ( slides)
  • i-Semantics’2013, Poster session of the 9th Int. Conference on Semantic Systems, Graz, Austria. ( poster)

Awards and grants

  • Project Grant OpenAIRE Matchmaker: An innovative recommendation service for finding new scientific collaborators, OpenAIRE Open Tender Calls LOT II Value-added services (2018), 15k for the Know-Center as co-writer. ( link)
  • Project Grant for Health-Literacy und Diversity fuer SchuelerInnen der Sekundaerstufe I (HeLi-D), Gesundheitsfonds Steiermark (2017), 75k for the Know-Center as co-writer. ( link)
  • Travel Grant for the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'2016) in Halifax, Canada. ( link)
  • Project Grant for Data Market Austria (DMA), IKT der Zukunft (2015), 286k for the Know-Center as co-writer. ( link)
  • Best Demo Honourable Mention at the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business (i-Know’2015) in Graz, Austria. ( link)
  • Best Poster Award at the 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT’2014) in Santiago, Chile. ( link)

Co-supervised theses

  • Wagner, M. (2018). Implementing a Recommender System for News-related Content. Master thesis. (to be published)
  • Punz, A. (2016). Detection and Analysis of Communities on Twitter. Bachelor thesis. ( .pdf)

Software projects

  • TagRec, Towards A Standardized Tag Recommender Benchmarking Framework. ( link)
  • ScaR, Scalable Recommendation-as-a-Service. ( link)
  • SNA, Computational Social Networks and Demand Forecasting. ( link)
  • Layers, The Learning Layers Technical Infrastructure. ( link)
  • Matchmaker, Spark scientific collaboration. ( link)


Contact

dkowald [AT] know [MINUS] center [DOT] at

+43 (316) 873-30846

dkowald1

Dominik Kowald

Dominik Kowald, Know-Center GmbH, Inffeldgasse 13/5, 8010 Graz, Austria