Prof. Dr. Jasminko Novak | j.novak@eipcm.org
European Institute for Participatory Media e.V.
Pariser Platz 6
10117 Berlin
University of Applied Sciences, Stralsund
Zur Schwedenschanze 15
18435 Stralsund
Mission
Developing novel solutions to real-world challenges – bridging knowledge silos, bringing research to practice.
Real-world problems defy boundaries of individual disciplines. Developing novel solutions that can be turned into practice often requires bridging the gaps between knowledge and experts from different fields. Not framing the problem in terms of the knowledge known to a particular discipline, but framing knowledge from different disciplines in ways that make it relevant to the problem at hand. This is the challenge of trans-disciplinary collaboration and knowledge creation.
Current activities
enCOMPASS – Collaborative Recommendations, Visualisation and Adaptive Control for Personalised Energy Saving is research project funded by the EU Commission within the Horizon 2020 programme in the energy efficiency challenge. The project brings together 15 partners from 7 european countries to develop an innovative system for energy saving and behavioural change.
The enCOMPASS project will implement and validate an integrated socio-technical approach to behavioural change for energy saving, by developing innovative user-friendly digital tools for making energy data consumption available and understandable for the different users and stakeholders (residents, employees, pupils, building managers, utilities, ICT providers) empowering them to collaborate to achieve energy savings and manage their energy needs in energy efficient, cost-effective and comfort-preserving ways. It will demonstrate how this can be achieved by a novel approach that integrates user-centered visualisation of energy data from smart sensors and user-generated information with context-aware collaborative recommendations for energy saving, intelligent control and adaptive gamified incentives enabling effective and sustained behavioural change: http://eipcm.org/project/encompass/
POWER (Political and sOcial awareness on Water EnviRonmental challenges) wins Horizon 2020 EU commission funding in the CAPS programme (Collective Awareness Platforms for Social Innovation and Sustainability). POWER develops and establishes a Digital Social Platform supporting social and political awareness and citizen engagement in knowledge sharing and decision-making in water scarcity, security, quality and water consumption-related issues. It involves 4 pilot sites in different EU local authorities with numerous follower cities in its dissemination network, creating an important tool for EU water policy.
New paper accepted to ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Special Issue on Crowd in Intelligent Systems: Semertzidis, T.,Novak, J., Lazaridis, M., Melenhorst, M., Micheel, I., Michalopoulos, D., Böckle, M., Strintzis, M. G., Daras, P., A Crowd-powered System for Fashion Similarity Search, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology Vol 7. Nr. 4, 2016
New projects: CHEST – Collective Awareness for Social Tasks and SmartH2O – an ICT Platform to leverage on Social Computing for the efficient management of water consumption, selected for funding by the EU commission.
Associate Editor of the journal Human Computation, an international and interdisciplinary forum for high-quality scholarly articles in all areas of human computation concerning the design or analysis of human computation systems and their applications.
Invited chapter on “Collective Action in Human Computation” for the Handbook of Human Computation, a forthcoming publication by Springer aiming to be a comprehensive and interdisciplinary treatment of Human-based Computation (HC), the science of distributed systems which combine human and machine intelligence.
Tutorial Chair for SCA 2013 – 3rd International Conference on Social Computing and Its Applications (IEEE).
SoHuman 2013 is a workshop series on Social Media for Crowdsourcing and Human Computation. This workshop series brings together researchers and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunites of applying social media to designing and studying methods, systems and applications of collective intelligence – with a special focus on crowdsourcing and human computation. By emphasizing practical challenges and experiences with real-world applications, the SoHuman workshops stimulate the discussion on best-practices and novel approaches in this still young and quickly growing field.
CUbRIK is a 36 month Collaborative Project, partially funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework ICT Programme for Research and Technological Development, Grant agreement no: 287704. CUbRIK will provide programmable pipelines implementing workflow for search-based processes coordinated across machine, human and crowd-sourced tasks for the three typical processes of multimedia search: content, query and relevance feedback processing.
Member of Think BETA – Evolution of Smart Cities, a European think-tank with global members, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Co-Founder of the Social Innovation Lab (SILab) run jointly by the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governanceand the European Institute for Participatory Media. The SILab provides a trans-disciplinary playfield for learning about and experimenting with novel forms of social innovation enabled by new technologies. It connects actors from civil society, business, politics, public institutions and scientific research into joint projects developing real-world solutions to pressing social challenges (e.g. in health, education, democratic processes). We are currently planning a network of local hubs in different German regions (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg) and southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Croatia).
Member of the research advisory board of the Energy Turn Trialogues of the Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, a participatory process bringing together a number of actors from politics, business, civil society, science and media into a multi-stakeholder deliberation on the strategic design and implementation of the “energy turn” (Energiewende) in Germany.
My particular research contribution focuses on the socio-technical design and evaluation of the process of participatory knowledge integration and the harnessing of practical potentials of new technologies to support it – such as the use of collaborative knowledge visualization and online social deliberation. More broadly I am also involved as a member of the expert-groups (sub-trialogues) on “Energy vision”, “Process design” and “Energy efficiency”.
Professional Background
I have been pursuing my work in basic and applied scientific research over the last 15 years in different contexts and positions (e.g., Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communications – now Fraunhofer IAIS, University of Zürich). This includes lecturing at different European universities, leading teams and large research projects and consortia (EU/BMBF) as well as business consulting for companies in the fields of media, IT, telecommunications, finance, health and creative industries.
