The first Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus in Germany was launched in 2010. After seven years of research on "Informational Environ­ments", the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Tübingen (WCT) conducted research on cognitive interfaces from 2017. Now, after ten successful years, the WCT is coming to an end. To celebrate this research era, the final event of the WCT will take place in virtual space on 15 May 2020 at 11 a.m. Instead of a face-to-face symposium and official ceremony at the IWM with all members, cooperation partners, funders and friends of the WCT, the event will take place completely online, due to Coronavirus.

By resolution of the Joint Science Conference (GWK), the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien is granted additional funding for the expansion of its research. The establishment of a research network on human-agent interaction will begin this year, followed in 2021 by the new lab Data Science. At the end of the build-up phase in 2022, the IWM will then receive additional permanent grants of around 1.2 million Euros per year.

With this expansion, the Institute is reacting to the rapid growth of Big Data. For the analysis of knowledge acquisition, the complex data sets offer enormous potential: They enable processes of human information processing, for example on social media, to be examined comprehensively and directly in the application context.
The new IWM lab Data Science is therefore dedicated to the goal of rendering large amounts of data interpretable and researching new evaluation methods such as AI-based systems. It combines specific knowledge from psychology, communication science and neuroscience with approaches of computer science and methods of statistics. The group is headed by a W3-professorship in cooperation with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tübingen. In addition, the establishment of a network on Human-Agent Interaction is also part of the project. Its research subjects are the acceptance and user behaviour when interacting with intelligent voice assistants.

"We are pleased that the GWK supports the expansion of the IWM", Director Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress welcomes the decision. "By continuously researching the potential of Big Data for knowledge processes, we provide decisive impulses for a society that is further challenged and transformed by digital media".

At the end of the year, Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress visited the cultural centre Urania in Berlin in the context of a lecture series of the Leibniz Association to address one of 2019 central questions in digitisation: How is knowledge created in times of Wikipedia and echo chambers?

“Before digitisation, knowledge was mainly imparted by experts. Now it is often collaboratively generated online but also influenced by the subjective convictions of the communities,” Prof. Cress provocatively emphasized at the beginning of her lecture. In the following, the head of the IWM illustrated knowledge construction processes using Wikipedia. Due to the highly dynamic exchange and the rigid rules of the Wiki community, articles are created which in terms of their quality come close to entries of the renowned Britannica Encyclopaedia. Yet, Wikipedia is not completely neutral. Knowledge systems mirror the norms of their respective community and draw people into their own set of rules, as do other online encyclopaedias like Metapedia and Conservapedia. Cress pointed out: “In order to secure a high level of quality, knowledge construction needs friction, dialogue and disruptive algorithms.”