Open Topics for Bachelor/Master-Theses
Innovative Retail Laboratory
The Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) is an application-oriented research laboratory of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), which was installed in the head office of the German chain store GLOBUS SB-Warenhaus Holding in St. Wendel. This close cooperation with Globus experts provides the individual projects with the possibility to concentrate on the precise demands and potentials of future self-service stores and accelerates the implementation of research results.
In IRL we conduct testings in a large number of different fields all connected to intelligent shopping consultants, which range from a virtual assistant responsible for matters of dieting and allergies, over a digital sommelier, to personalized cross and up selling, smart items with digital product memories as a further development of the RFID technology, indoor positioning and navigation as well as new logistics concepts, to see if they are suitable for everyday life and useful for customers.
But the concepts and technologies that regard the self-service store of the future as a place for shopping are not IRL’s only focus. The relation between the store and its customers begins way before the shopping trip itself takes place. It starts with an individual shopping preparation and a personalized presentation of offers at home and will be continued afterwards through advice that is given about purchased goods and information about their use.
New ways of customer interaction are developed and tested for implementation. The range varies from personalized shopping assistants, “talking” products as well as intelligent shopping carts, which plan and show the way through the store according to your shopping list. Furthermore they can give advice on what to buy for the recipes you have in mind, they compare products, point out special offers in a personalized way and give additional information about the products.
On 450 square meters IRL provides a unique infrastructure for intelligent shopping environments. The public will be invited to experience demonstrators, recent developments and visions for the future of shopping on a first hand basis during selected events and guided tours.
My Projects
Present
appazaar is a recommender system that suggests apps from the Android Market. appazaar is the main driver of my PhD work following the approach of deployment-based research. It is exiting – both inspiring and challenging – to run a system in the wild. On the one hand, the users' feedback leads to new ideas and shapes the project's focus towards a really useful platform, but on the other hand the system requires a lot of engineering work and maintaining. However, it is fun! Please contact me if you are interested in joining the project (e.g. for a master thesis or research collaboration).
ADiWa is my main research project at DFKI's Innovative Retail Laboratory. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and partners are – among others – SAP, DB Schenker, Fraunhofer and Globus. Within the project we investigate how the Internet of Things can be integrated into business processes and supply chains. In our working package we explore multimodal input techniques for creating shopping lists.
Past
procomo was my main research project at Münster University of Applied Sciences. The project's aim is to enable end-users to build their own mobile applications by following a web-based visual programming approach. Additionally, we also laid the foundation for a context-aware recommender engine which filtered those user-generated apps and suggested relevant apps to its users based on context, e.g. location. This recommender system further evolves as part of appazaar. procomo was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
ardoo.me is a web tool that enables end-users to build their own augmented reality applications. I had the initial idea which further evolved in Gernot Bauer's group at Münster University of Applied Sciences. Morin Ostkamp implemented a very nice and easy to use web tool for the layman's AR creations. We were able to win psv marketing to create a nice branding as well as to run and maintain the platform as a product.
SOPUS was the project of my master thesis done at Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics. We applied simulation based optimization to develop a planning tool for two-stage order picking systems. The results are published and have been awarded with the Rincklake-Preis.
Cloning and Similarity was my bachelor thesis at LBS Informationstechnologie GmbH, Münster. We investigated, how we can find redundancies in the source code of a large and monolithically grown system written in COBOL. We applied software metrics and cluster analysis to highlight duplicated code directly within the development process.
