We are pleased to welcome Prof. Steven Kimbrough (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) as a guest from June 22 to 26, 2026. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, evolutionary computation, and decision support systems. Several members of our group have been collaborating with him on joint research projects.

As part of his visit, Prof. Kimbrough will give a short impulse talk at the SOSEC conference "How Are You, Democracy? — Academic Conference on Measuring Sentiment and Polarization in Times of Crises," which takes place on June 25, 2026 at the TRIANGEL space in Karlsruhe.

Last week, members of WIN participated in the NeuroIS Retreat 2026 in Vienna, one of the leading venues for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of neuroscience, information systems, and human-computer interaction.

The retreat provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with researchers from around the world, discuss emerging topics in NeuroIS, and receive valuable feedback on ongoing research projects. During the conference, our team contributed three research presentations:

Last month, Marie Thederan from the research group “Smart Grids and Energy Markets” (SGEM) had the chance to participate in the DTU PES Summer School on Future Energy Systems in Copenhagen.

The 5-day course about the latest developments and applications of machine learning and optimization for energy systems provided an exceptional learning experience. In particular, lectures in the context of market design and machine learning were a perfect match to Marie’s research on two-level reinforcement learning for energy market and policy design within the ADAPT project.   

From March 30th to 31st, Kim K. Miskiw and Marie Thederan from the Chair of Prof. Weinhardt attended the ABM4Energy Conference 2026 on Agent-Based Modeling for Energy Economics and Energy Policy in Vienna. The event was the perfect opportunity to present our latest research with ASSUME (Agent-Based Electricity Markets Simulation Toolbox) and discuss future directions with other researchers in agent-based modeling for energy-related topics.From the group of Smart Grids and Energy Markets, Kim K. Miskiw presented her work with the title “Beyond Reward: Equilibrium Validation for MADRL-Based Electricity Market Simulations”.

As part of the Triangel Days of Democracy, the SOSEC consortium hosts How Are You, Democracy? – Academic Conference on Measuring Sentiment and Polarization in Times of Crises on June 25, 2026 at Kronenplatz, Karlsruhe.The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology invite researchers to submit poster contributions by June 10, 2026. The conference brings together empirical research on how social sentiment, polarization, and trust in institutions co-evolve during political and societal crises. We welcome contributions from political science, sociology, communication research, computational social science, psychology, and adjacent fields. Accepted posters will be published in a curated online collection after the conference. Participation is free of charge.

We welcome Felix Wang as a new team member and junior researcher at the Chair of Prof. Weinhardt at WIN. Felix completed his Bachelor's thesis at our chair in 2025, where he explored machine learning techniques for investigating financial decision-making and its psychophysiological correlates based on biosignals. In his subsequent role as a research assistant at our institute, he further gained experience running experiments at the KD2Lab and doing web-development for an EEG data collection tool.

From 14 to 18 March 2026, Cosima Pfannschmidt and Dr. Jonas Fegert (Digital Democracy and Participation) hosted the fourth TWON CitizenLab in Brussels, bringing together citizens from across Europe to engage directly with ongoing research on digital platforms and democratic discourse. The CitizenLabs are a central part of the EU-funded project “TWON – Twin of Online Social Networks”.The CitizenLab provided a unique space for exchange between researchers and a diverse group of European citizens. Under the theme *“Voices Rising: Rebuilding Bridges. Dialogue, Trust and Solidarity Post October 7th”*, participants discussed how digital platforms shape societal discourse and explored ways to foster more constructive and inclusive online environments despite societal polarization.

Dear students,

if you enjoyed our previous lectures and would like to further deepen your interest in current research topics, we would like to draw your attention to our seminars in the summer semester 2026 – you can apply until 22.03 through the Wiwi-Portal.This term, we are offering seminars on Applied Responsible AI, Positive Information Systems, and Smart Grids & Energy Markets. The seminars address timely and research-oriented topics at the intersection of AI, digital work, decision-making, human-centered systems, energy markets, open data, and information systems research. Depending on the topic, students will engage with conceptual, literature-based, empirical, or design-oriented work.

Last Monday, we took our students that take part in our eFinance Lecture on an excursion to Börse Stuttgart to complement the lecture content with first-hand insights from a real trading venue. Börse Stuttgart is a major German exchange organization serving retail and institutional investors across multiple asset classes.

We were warmly hosted by Dr. Martin Wagener, who is an alumni of WIN, contributes to the eFinance teaching as a lecturer and also works at Börse Stuttgart Group as Head of Group Regulatory Affairs, amongst other responsibilities. During a lecture session, Dr. Wagener connected key concepts from the course—such as market structures, liquidity, and the trading process—to how markets are organized and operated in practice.

The Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 2026 took place from January 6 to 10 on Maui, Hawaii. The Chair of Information & Market Engineering was represented at the conference by Prof. Dr. Christof Weinhardt and Alexander Grote.

Alexander Grote presented the joint paper “Prompting for the Unknown: Leveraging In-Context-Learning for Few-Shot Open Set Classification” co-authored with Prof. Dr. Anuja Hariharan and Prof. Dr. Christof Weinhardt. In addition, Prof. Dr. Weinhardt served as a minitrack chair together with Prof. Dr. Stefan Stieglitz and Dr. Jonas Fegert.

The ASSUME consortium has successfully completed its latest development sprint, achieving several important advancements within the project’s open-source framework. ASSUME (“Agent-based Simulation of Sustainable Multi-Energy Systems”) is a research initiative funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). The project develops a modular, scalable and transparent simulation environment designed to analyse future energy systems and market structures under uncertainty.

Our research team at WIN just hosted the 5th iteration of "Biosignals Connect" (BioCon) in the KD2Lab – an event series that brings together international researchers with shared interests in biosignals and adaptive systems.

On two days, we saw 14 presentations from KIT, Politecnico di Milano, University of Milano, University of Bremen, and SUPSI – covering research from information systems, industrial engineering, marketing, psychology and biomedical engineering.