Smart new world?

The year is 2023, and the world is on a digital journey. The University of Mannheim, too, has long been working to meet the challenges the future holds for its teaching, research, and administrative operations. This issue illustrates what this shiny new world looks like at the university and how researchers in Mannheim are shaping it.

Hybrid teaching, online examinations, and electronic invoicing — we asked staff members from the University IT (UNIT) about their work. They are the people, after all, who keep everything ticking over smoothly day after day and make sure that projects introducing new digital technologies are launched successfully. We also spoke with Professor Florian Stahl. He is on a mission to unearth buried treasure in the data jungle by making increasingly abundant data more usable by other researchers. And then there is the hot topic of artificial intelligence (AI): What are we trying to get to grips with here? What is ChatGPT, and how does it work? Computer science professors Dr. Simone Ponzetto and Dr. Heiner Stuckenschmidt explain what’s going on in an informative interview that reassures us that no magic is involved — just math. Intensive research into AI has been ongoing at our university for more than 20 years. We spoke to a selection of researchers engaging with the topic from the perspectives of multiple disciplines and asked them about their projects and results. What we learned is that artificial intelligence is here to stay, but that the rules it uses to operate and calculate will need to be set judiciously and pro-actively by us humans to make sure that it is used in ways that benefit the public. As using ChatGPT has long become routine for students, media expert Professor Hartmut Wessler integrated a seminar on artificial intelligence into his teaching program for the spring/summer semester 2023. This opened up opportunities for him to explore its strengths and weaknesses together with 25 students. And then Dr. Andreas Gulyas, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics, straight out went and asked ChatGPT about how artificial intelligence is going to change the labor market. Last but not least, six doctoral students from the School of Business Informatics and Mathematics wrap up this focus topic by introducing their dissertation topics from the realms of AI and the digital transformation.

As you may have noticed, we have — in keeping with our theme — used illustrations created with some support from AI image generation for the focus texts in this issue. Graphic design agency uc graphic fed the image generation app Midjourney with instructions — “prompts” — that told it what to do. The prompts have been retained in the magazine layout. The image of a student used on the cover is not a photograph of a real person, but a computer-generated image created using Midjourney. Would you have been able to spot that at first sight?