Quality and Usability

Vera Schmitt

Biography:

Vera Schmitt completed her undergraduate studies in Politics and Public Administration (B.A.) at the University of Konstanz. During this time, she developed a keen interest in statistics and co-founded CorrelAid, a non-profit community of data science enthusiasts. Afterward, she pursued her passion for data science by enrolling in a Master's program in Data Science at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. As a member of the ChangemakerXchange she actively contributed to projects of CorrelAid in various countries, including Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore. In 2019, Vera successfully defended her Master's thesis titled "The Ethical Dimension of Autonomous Machines: An Algorithmic Analysis of Artificial Moral Agents." Following this, she started a Ph.D. at the Q&U Labe at the TU Berlin, concerning the topic of economic aspects of privacy. Throughout her time at the Q&U Lab, Vera explored diverse areas of interest, where she focuses mainly on disinformation detection, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and ethical and legal considerations concerning machine learning and AI systems. Her dedication to advancing the responsible and ethical application of AI has been evident in her work and research.

 

Current Projects:

Past Projects: 

Research Topics: 

NLP: 

  • Claim extraction and claim verification 
  • Provenance analysis of disinformation 
  • Detection of disinformation campaigns 
  • Disinformation detection in text (and images) 
  • Green claim detection (wrt. SDGs) 

HCI: 

  • Design of intelligent decision-support systems for collaborative disinformation detection 
  • Design and integration of human meaningful AI explanations (for different user groups - experts vs lay people)
  • Design and implementation of various transparency aspects for trustworthy AI-systems 

Ethical and Legal Aspects of LLMs: 

  • Implication of the AI Act on development and use of LLM-based services
  • Ethically aligned user interface design for collaborative disinformation detection 
  • Moral autonomous agents: consequentialism vs deontology 

Usable Privacy:

  • Economic perspective of privacy and influencing factors 
  • Influence of information type on willingness to pay or accept money in exchange for personal data 
  • Educational aspects of usable privacy - how to nudge users towards a more privacy friendly behavior 

DataSynthesis:

  • Generating synthetic data for medical records (also time-series data) 
  • Evaluation of synthetic datasets based on privacy aspects and data quality 

Teaching:

  • Usable Privacy Seminar (winter semester)
  • Statistic Seminar (winter semester) 
  • Ethics of AI Seminar (summer semester)
  • Advanced Study Projects (different projects for various topics) 

Address:

Quality and Usability Lab
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
TU Berlin
Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7
D-10587 Berlin, Germany

Contact: 

vera.schmitt(at)tu-berlin.de

ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9735-6956 

Personal website:
veraschmitt.github.io 

Guest researcher:
Speech and Language Technology Group (SLT), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

 

Publikationen

2023

Khamsehashari, Razieh; Schmitt, Vera; Polzehl, Tim; Mohtaj, Salar; Möller, Sebastian
How Risky is Multimodal Fake News Detection? A Review of Cross-Modal Learning Approaches under EU AI Act Constrains
3rd Symposium on Security and Privacy in Speech CommunicationausSPSC, Seite 01–10
Herausgeber: ISCA, Dublin, Irland
August 2023
Spang, Robert P.; Wardah, Wafaa; Schmitt, Vera; Möller, Sebastian
Unraveling the Hangry Rater: Non-linear Effects of Hunger on Multimedia Quality Perception
2023 15th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), Seite 228–231
Juni 2023
Spang, Robert P.; Wardah, Wafaa; Schmitt, Vera; Möller, Sebastian
Comparing Simulated and Real Conversations for QoE Assessments: Insights from ARKit-Based Facial Configuration Analyses
2023 15th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), Seite 224–227
Juni 2023
Ashrafi, Navid; Schmitt, Vera; Spang, Robert P.; Möller, Sebastian; Voigt-Antons, Jan-Niklas
Protect and Extend - Using GANs for Synthetic Data Generation of Time-Series Medical Records
2023 15th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), Seite 171–176
2023
Schmitt, Vera; Li, Zhenni; Poikela, Maija; Spang, Robert P.; Möller, Sebastian
What is Your Location Privacy Worth? Monetary Valuation of Different Location Types and Privacy Influencing Factors
Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile NetworksausWiSec '23, Seite 19–29
Herausgeber: Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA
2023
ISBN
9781450398596
Schmitt, Vera; Sivizaca Conde, Daniel; Sahitaj, Premtim; Möller, Sebastian
What is Your Information Worth? A Systematic Analysis of the Endowment Effect of Different Data Types
, Proceedings of NordSec 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer ScienceBand14324, Seite 223–242
Herausgeber: Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham
2023
ISBN
978-3-031-47748-5
Nizamoglu, Ata; Dahm, Lea; Sari, Talia; Schmitt, Vera; Mohtaj, Salar; Möller, Sebastian
A Transfer Learning Approach for SDGs Classification of Sustainability Reports
10th Language & Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics, Seite 96–201
2023
Mohtaj, Salar; Schmitt, Vera; Khamsehashari, Razieh; Möller, Sebastian
Multi-task Learning for German Text Readability Assessment
CLiC-it - 9th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics
2023
Schmitt, Vera; Nicholson, James; Möller, Sebastian
Is Your Surveillance Camera App Watching You? A Privacy Analysis
Science and Information Conference, Seite 1375–1393
Herausgeber: Springer, Heidelberg, Germany
2023
Schmitt, Vera; Spang, Robert P.; Wardah, Wafaa; Möller, Sebastian
Is Privacy a Trait or a State? Examining Hangriness and its Influence on Individual's Privacy Perception
:19–29
2023
Fullpaper
Herausgeber: Gesellschaft für Informatik eV
Polzehl, Tim; Schmitt, Vera; Feldhus, Nils; Meyer, Joachim; Möller, Sebastian
Fighting Disinformation: Overview of Recent AI-Based Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction for Intelligent Decision Support Systems
Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - HUCAPP,. International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP-2022), Seite 267–278
INSTICC
Herausgeber: SciTePress
2023
ISBN
978-989-758-634-7

2022

Schmitt, Vera; Poikela, Maija; Möller, Sebastian
Android Permission Manager, Visual Cues, and their Effect on Privacy Awareness and Privacy Literacy
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and SecurityausARES 2022, Seite 1–12
Herausgeber: arXiv, Vienna, Austria
August 2022
Mohtaj, Salar; Schmitt, Vera; Möller, Sebastian
A Feature Extraction based Model for Hate Speech Identification
Proc. FIRE 2021 - Hate Speech and offensive content detection (HASOC) TrackausFIRE 2021 - Hate Speech and offensive content detection (HASOC) Track, Seite 47–51
Herausgeber: arXiv, Lous Tourils, France
Januar 2022

2021

Schmitt, Vera; Solopova, Veronika; Woloszyn, Vinicius; Pinho Pinhal, Jessica
Implications of the New Regulation Proposed by the European Commission on Automatic Content Moderation
Proc. 2021 ISCA Symposium on Security and Privacy in Speech CommunicationausISCA Symposium on Security and Privacy in Speech Communication 2021, Seite 47–51
Herausgeber: ISCA, Lous Tourils, France
November 2021
Woloszyn, Vinicius; Cortes, Eduardo G; Amantea, Rafael; Schmitt, Vera; Barone, Dante AC; Möller, Sebastian
Towards a Novel Benchmark for Automatic Generation of ClaimReview Markup
13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021ausWeb Science, Seite 29–35
Herausgeber: Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, United States
Juni 2021
ISBN
978-1-4503-8330-1
Schmitt, Vera; Poikela, Maija; Möller, Sebastian
Willingness to Pay for the Protection of Different Data Types
Mensch und Computer 2021 - WorkshopbandausMensch und Computer 2021, Seite 29–35
Herausgeber: Wienrich, C., Wintersberger, P. & Weyers, B. (Hrsg.), Bonn
Juni 2021
Woloszyn, Vinicius; Kobti, Joseph; Schmitt, Vera
Towards Automatic Green Claim Detection
Forum for Information Retrieval EvaluationausFIRE 2021, Seite 28–34
Herausgeber: Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA
2021
ISBN
9781450395960