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How fair are AI decisions?
On October 22, 2025, the State Agency for Civic Education of North Rhine-Westphalia, the AI Academy OWL, and the Consumer Advice Center of North Rhine-Westphalia invite you to the Central Library in Düsseldorf. Starting at 6 p.m., there will be a discussion about how fair artificial intelligence really is—whether in job applications, insurance, or the handling of user data.
Practical examples from consumer counseling will be used to illustrate typical forms of unfairness in AI systems. Methods for avoiding discrimination will also be presented, and the fundamental question of whether certain decisions should be automated at all will be raised.
With contributions from Dr. Ayten Öksüz (NRW Consumer Advice Center) and Jun.-Prof. Benjamin Paaßen (Bielefeld University). Moderator: Dr. Ulrike Kuhl (Bielefeld University).
The event is open to the public and free of charge, but registration is required at https://ki-fair.de/anmeldung/
Deutschlandfunk: Emirates introduce AI as a core subject from elementary school onwards – what about us?
In this edition of Studio 9 (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), Prof. Benjamin Paaßen discusses the United Arab Emirates' decision to introduce artificial intelligence as a school subject from elementary school onwards. The discussion highlights the opportunities and challenges that such an approach brings with it – from media literacy and critical thinking to ethical issues and teacher training. The focus is on how Germany should respond to this development and whether our education system is sufficiently prepared for the digital future.
TRR318 Conference: Contextualizing Explanations
In June 2025, we co-organized the TRR318 Conference on “Contextualizing Explanations”. Take a look:
https://trr318.uni-paderborn.de/konferenzen/conference-contextualizing-explanations/
Papers accepted at AIED and EDM!
In July 2025, the International Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in Education and Educational Data Mining take place in Palermo and Alina, Adia and Jesper will represent our group to present three papers: One on the steps students take in programming (Jesper), one on how much it helps teachers if learning analytics is interpretable (Adia) and one on our intelligent tutoring system itself (Alina). Congrats to all!
Intelligent Tutoring System for Programming Education
The main project of our group is to build up an intelligent tutoring system for programming education. That means: We want to offer programming exercises that students can solve in a browser (so far, so standard) and whenever they do not know how to proceed, they can get automatically generated hints (e.g. based on LLMs, but we are actively researching different options) AND the programming exercises themselves get selected based on an estimate of the student’s evolving ability. In other words: You should always get an exercise which challenges you but is achievable.
We offered an alpha version of the system for an introduction to Python programming in the tutorials of “Introduction to Machine Learning” and “Introduction to Data Mining” back at the end of 2023 and in October 2024. In January 2025, we have applied it for the first time for a prolonged amount of time to practice for the “Introduction to Data Mining” exam.
Special thanks go to Jesper and Alina who not only programmed the system.
KI:edu.nrw
In 2024, we handed in a research proposal for explaining learner models using large language models (XLM), which got accepted as a praxis project as part of the network KI:edu.nrw. We will run this project in summer term 2025 and look forward to working with other NRW universities on demonstrating how AI methods can be responsibly and effectively integrated in teaching.
Teaching Awards “Golden Chalk” for “Introduction to Data Mining” and “User Studies in Interactive Intelligent Systems”
In January 2024, we concluded our first big course, “Introduction to Data Mining”, with about 150 students. The course teaches data mining techniques (from probability theory and classical statistics up to generative AI), interpretation and visualization of models and results, and critical thinking about the application of data mining in society.
The students apparently liked the course and awarded us the faculty-wide teaching award “Golden Chalk”. Even better: In the summer, we got another golden chalk for our course “User Studies in Interactive Intelligent Systems”! Thanks go especially to Alina who organized all the entire exercise sessions for both courses.
For winter term 2024/2025, we have further improved the course based on student feedback. In particular: we now have (short) preparatory and follow-up videos to make it easier to prepare and re-read the lecture materials. We also added an intelligent tutoring system course to prepare better for the exam.