iDay: Studying Informatics and Artificial Intelligence
On Thursday, February 6th 2025, the departments of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces (AIHI) at the University of Salzburg invited schools and high school graduates to get a behind-the-scenes look into the study programs and research of the departments. Among others, two EXDIGIT members gave talks about their research projects:
Sustainable digitalization through green awareness (H2)
Dr. Narges Mehran spoke about environmental protection and sustainability in computer science. We wanted to raise students’ awareness of energy consumption and the environmental impact of digitalization. In her presentation, Narges demonstrated the impact modern technologies can have on the environment. In particular, she used the example of movie/series streaming and calculated the energy consumption of “The Batman”. As a takeaway, Narges said that streaming consumes a lot of energy and that we should watch darker, lower-quality films more often.
Fostering privacy and transparency in social media
The second EXDIGIT talk at iDay 2025 was given by Nicola Leschke, who introduced the topic of privacy engineering (LINK: https://pepsys-group.github.io/research), with a particular focus on technical tools that foster data subject rights and transparency. In particular, she presented the following open source tools, developed by the team around Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Pallas:
- TIBO, a chatbot that answers questions about a privacy policy, code available on github (https://github.com/DaSKITA/chatbot)
- CODE, a browser extension that encodes transparency information into traffic light symbols, code available on github (https://github.com/Transparency-Information-Language/CODE2)
- DARA, a website and browser extension that simplifies personal data access requests, try it out here (https://daskita.github.io/dara-frontend/)
More information under:
https://informatik.cs.plus.ac.at/post/i-day-2025-information-day-for-students/
(c) Nicola Leschke, Cansu Demir
