Women face unique challenges in computer science, a field that has been designed for men for too long, and where women are still underrepresented. Although information technology has been with us for a long time and artificial intelligence is now rapidly finding its way into more and more areas of life, there seem to be few efforts at a professional level to integrate the diverse interests of women into computer science.

Instead, computer science as a discipline still tends to be oriented towards the traditionally male-dominated worlds of experience in everyday life and work, resulting in products and applications geared predominantly towards men. As a result, computer science threatens to remain an unattractive area for women, where they do not see themselves represented.

To address and counteract these challenges, opportunities for cross-institutional exchange and mutual support have become an invaluable resource for women in computing.

The University of Bremen’s Informatica Feminale aims at providing such an opportunity: to support and connect female computer science students and professionals in order to promote equal opportunities for women in the field.

About the Informatica Feminale

From August 14 to 29, 2024, the 27th Informatica Feminale - Summer University for Women in Computer Science will take place at the University of Bremen. Over 60 courses will be offered on current specialist topics as well as interdisciplinary topics. As part of the Informatica Feminale, Michaela Kümpel, postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at our institute, is giving the course Creating Actionable Knowledge Graphs for Agent Applications.

About the course

This course focuses on the use of knowledge in applications to support users in their daily lives. It covers topics such as how to represent knowledge in a way that it can be understood by machines, how to acquire knowledge from different sources (including web scraping), and how to link such different pieces of knowledge. It will also discuss how agents can reason about this knowledge and how different agents such as websites, AR applications, or robots can use knowledge to assist users in their daily lives. The course will provide tutorials, and participants will be asked to choose a topic of their own interest (such as recommending a diet, filtering recipes based on preferences, or providing basic health support) for which they will create an actionable knowledge graph to be used for user support on a website. All necessary steps are covered in the course and tutorial.

Target group

The course is aimed at advanced female students and practitioners from engineering, computing and related fields.

Requirements

Activities before class time: mandatory email exchange with lecturers. Installation of Jupyter, Python, Pip (with support), exchange about course idea: 3 hours.

Credit for participation

Participants can receive one Credit Point (ECTS) for taking part in the course. Further credit points can be earned by submitting course work/ additional work.

Curious to learn more?

Extensive background information, the full course program and registration can be found here: https://www.informatica-feminale.de/