Hi there, I'm Thiemo.

I am a PostDoc and project leader at the Machine Learning for Education Laboratory (ML4ED) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

My research lies in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction with influences from Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. I strive to understand how humans perceive, interact, and learn with intelligent tools. Based on these insights, I build adaptive user interfaces that go beyond static and rule-based interaction to advance the capabilities when working and learning in the digital world.

Specifically, I am driven by the vast opportunities to enhance and improve pedagogical scenarios based on recent advantages in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to enable humans to learn self-reliant and individually independent of an educator or their background. To do so, I use techniques from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to build AI-powered education tools. My research follows three connected main lines of work: 1) create and study pedagogical conversational agents or intelligent writing support systems to improve educational scenarios, 2) explore methods and techniques to model student performance in numerical or textual data, and 3) build computational approaches that control when, where and how to provide students intelligent feedback and self-evaluation.

As part of a research team, I have developed an adaptive argumentation writing support system which helps individuals to develop better writing and reasoning skills (Link to CHI 2020 paper). Also, I 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, I designed an empathy writing support tool by modeling the cognitive and emotional empathy structures in student-written texts (Link to ACL 2021 paper).

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

Here you find an overview of my publications at Google Scholar and my academic profile at ReserachGate

Selected Publications

Wambsganss, Thiemo, Matthias, Söllner, Kenneth, Koedinger, & Leimeister, Jan Marco (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, Thiemo, Niklaus, Christina (2022): Modeling Persuasive Discourse to Adaptively Support Students’ Argumentative Writing In The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AC 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, Thiemo; Küng, Tobias; Matthias, Söllner & Leimeister, Jan Marco (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

Education

2022 - today: PostDoc and project group lead at the Machine Learning for Education Laboratory (ML4ED) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, CH
2022 - 2022: Research Visitor at the Natural Language and Information Processing (NLIP) research group, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2021 - 2022: Visiting Research Collaborator at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA
2018 - 2022: PhD. Student and Research Associate at the Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen (HSG), CH
2016 - 2018: Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Industrial Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), GER
2017: ME310 Design Thinking Class as part of the Sugar network with Stanford University, USA
2015: Bachelor thesis within a scientific exchange at the Software Institute at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing, CHN
2012-2016: Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Industrial Engineering, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), GER

Natively Developed Prototypes

I 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)
	Elea - an empathy feedback tool an adaptive empathy writing support tool based on artificial intelligence for students to foster empathic writing independent of an instructor, time and location
	Eva - a course evaluation bot a chatbot for personal course evaluations in large-scale or distance-learning scenarios (Info)
	Hermine - a Q&A-Bot designed for educational settings a chatbot for frequently-asked questions in large-scale or distance-learning scenarios (Info)

Corpora and Data Sets

In order to build HCI innovations, I collected, annotated and scientifically evaluated different corpora and data sets to train novel machine learning or deep learning models. Here is an overview of my work:

German User-Generated Repair Instruction Corpus: 3,157 user-generated posts, with 682 tagged “Instruction” and 2,475 tagged “NoInstruction”, representing different characteristics of the platform motor-talk. Access

Argumentation Annotated Student Peer Reviews Corpus: 1000 persuasive student peer reviews about business model feedbacks annotated for their argumentative components and argumentative relations. Access

Argumentation Annotated Student Business Model Pitch Corpus: 200 persuasive business model pitches annotated for argumentative components, argumentative quality score and argumentative relations. Access

Cognitive and Emotional Empathy Annotated Student Peer Reviews Corpus: 500 student peer revies about business model feedbacks annotated for their cognitive and emotional empathy level according to key constructs. Access

Awards and Honors

2021 Nominee Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
Pedagogical Agents for Interactive Learning: A Taxonomy of Conversational Agents in Education (Link)
2021 Honourable Mention Award of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
ArgueTutor: An Adaptive Dialog-Based Learning System for Argumentation Skills (Link)
2021 1st place DELINA LEARNTEC Innovation award
ArgueLearn - Adaptive learning of argumentation skills based on artificial intelligence (Info)
2021 One-year research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF, Doc.Mobility) at Carnegie Mellon University (Info)
2021 Doctoral Consortium at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
Designing Adaptive Argumentation Learning Systems Based on Artificial Intelligence (Link)
2021 Best Reviewer Award at the International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik
2021 Nominee Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik
Designing an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool Designing an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool (Info)
2020 Best Reviewer Award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
2020 Best Theory Paper First Runner-Up Award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
The Anatomy of User Experience with Conversational Agents: A Taxonomy and Propositions of Service Clues (Link)
2020 Honourable Mention Award of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
AL: An Adaptive Learning Support System for Argumentation Skills (Link)

Invited Talks

2022 University of Cambridge, UK, Natural Language and Information Processing Research Group hosted by Paula Buttery
2022 Data Science in Education Meetup London, UK, hosted by Aigner Picou
2022 German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, GER, Educational Technology Lab hosted by Niels Pinkwart
2022 Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, GER, Human Centered Ubiquitous Media hosted by Albrecht Schmidt
2022 University of Koblenz and Landau, GER, Institute for Education in Childhood and Adolescence hosted by Miriam Leuchter
2022 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, GER, Institute of Information Systems and Marketing hosted by Alexander Mädche
2021 Carnegie Mellon University, US, Language Technologies Institute hosted by Carolyn Rose
2021 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), CH, Machine Learning for Education Laboratory hosted by Tanja Käser
2021 University of Michigan, US, Interactive Systems Lab and AI Lab hosted by Xu Wang and Lu Wang
2021 Carnegie Mellon University, US, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) hosted by Ken Koedinger