MediaFutures is delighted to welcome several visiting researchers and master students this year. Let us introduce them to you:

Daniel Seibert is a research associate and PhD candidate at the department of Empirical Communication and Media Research at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies (IfKMW) at Leipzig University. He studied communication and media science with a focus on empirical research at Leipzig University (M.A.) and sociology and communication and media science at the University of Rostock (B.A.). His research interest revolves around artificial intelligence. During his stay at MediaFutures, Daniel will work on a third-party funded deepfake project, and will be engaging with fellow scholars from the University of Bergen involved in this field of research.

Giovanni Castiglia is a master student in Software Engineering at Politecnico di Bari (Italy). His ongoing master’s project concerns Multi-Modal Conversational Information Seeking (MMCIS) recommender systems in food and health domains. He is investigating the impact of multi-modal interaction (use of both text and images) between a conversational system and users in driving users towards healthier choices. The chatbot prototype, that is being developed in cooperation with a colleague Federica Calò, will be used in the user study for a possible research paper. He is supervised by professors Yashar Deldjoo and Fedelucio Narducci from Politecnico di Bari. At MediaFutures, Giovanni will be working on his master’s thesis under the supervision of the Centre’s director Prof. Christoph Trattner.

Heierli Cyriak is a master’s student in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zurich, where he focuses on the application of mixed reality in the industry. He is also generally interested in the innovative application of new technologies. To that end, he previously joined AMZ and ETH juniors. At AMZ, Cyriak was involved in building an electric racecar, and  transforming it into a completely self-driving vehicle. At ETH juniors, Cyriak participated in diverse projects with industry partners, and used his state-of-the-art knowledge, and ideas to provide innovative solutions.