News

At the IEEE IV 2025 in Romania, our research group was represented with 13 accepted papers. In addition, Ahmed Abouelazm won the Best Paper Award with his contribution "TPK: Trustworthy Trajectory Prediction Integrating Prior Knowledge For Interpretability and Kinematic Feasibility".

On March 1, 2024, the KIT Center for Mobility Systems and the Energy Lab at Campus North received an official visit from Dr. Volker Wissing, Federal Minister for Digital Affairs and Transport, and Members of the Bundestag Michael Theurer and Parsa Marvi.

A robot that helps children cross the street safely? What sounds like science fiction has become reality in Bratislava – with significant involvement from KIT. 

On September 22, 2024, the workshop takes place in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces. This workshop deals with the rise of micromobility services and Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) as a potential solution to problems like regulations, standardization and road safety.

The ISE group is one of the organizers of the International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS) 2024.

The year 2025 brought SECUSO many new things: In addition to four new employees and numerous new student assistants who joined our team in 2025, we also expanded our societal outreach with the citizen panel “Wir forschen Digital”. Since November 1, citizens from Karlsruhe are able to register for participation in research studies. Two major events have dominated most of the year: Until May, we prepared the evaluation of the Topic Engineering Secure Systems (ESS) as coordinator of the Human and Societal Factors research group. In October, we helped organize the International Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID), followed by the Dagstuhl Seminar on “Trustworthy Evidence-Based Elections”. We were also active in the area of research and teaching this year: a total of 24 scientific publications, in particular on the topics of security notifications and phishing, were published this year and we supervised a total of nine theses on various topics. As always, we have summarized all the news in our Christmas post. Enjoy reading and Merry Christmas!

The paper “The whos, whats, and whys of issues related to personal data and data protection in open-source projects on GitHub” by Anne Hennig, Lukas Schulte, Steffen Herbold, Oksana Kulyk and Peter Mayer was accepted as a journal-first paper for presentation at the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering. In the paper, 652 issues from open source projects on GitHub were examined to determine how, by whom and for what reason data protection topics are reported and discussed. Although there was a significant increase in issues after the GDPR came into force, it was found that data protection is discussed beyond compliance issues among developers. ICSE 2026 will take place from April 12-18, 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

[December 7-10, 2025] -  Last week, the SYDSEN research group had a strong presence at the 2025 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2025), held in Seattle, USA. WSC is the leading international conference in computer simulation, bringing together researchers and practitioners working on modeling, Digital Twins, decision support, and data-driven simulation.

At WSC 2025, SYDSEN contributed seven peer-reviewed papers addressing key challenges in research on Digital Twins. In addition, SYDSEN delivered a invited tutorial on data-driven Petri net model extraction and simulation for Digital Twins in smart manufacturing, providing practical methodologies for developing Digital Twins model extraction approaches.

📄 Paper Contributions

- Zare, A., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Preserving Dependencies in Partitioned Digital Twin Models for Enabling Modular Validation. 

- Šturek, D., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Exploring Integration of Surrogate Models Through a Case Study on Variable Frequency Drives. 

- Khodadadi, A., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Multi-flow Process Mining as an Enabler for Comprehensive Digital Twins of Manufacturing Systems. 

- Lee, H., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Exploring Data Requirements for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modeling. 

- Mostafa, O., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Data Requirements for Reliability-Oriented Digital Twins of Energy Systems: A Case Study Analysis. 

- Mahmoud, M., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Explainability in Digital Twins: Overview and Challenges. 

- Jungmann, M., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: Integrating Expert Trustworthiness into Digital Twin Models Extracted from Expert Knowledge and Internet of Things Data: A Case Study in Reliability. 

👨‍🏫 Tutorial Session:

- Khodadadi, A., Zare, A., Jungmann, M., Götz, M., Lazarova-Molnar, S.: A Tutorial on Data-Driven Petri Net Model Extraction and Simulation for Digital Twins in Smart Manufacturing. 

Overall, WSC 2025 provided an excellent platform for presenting our work, engaging with the global simulation and Digital Twin community, and contributing to the broader conference program.

Onwards to Glasgow for WSC2026!

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[December 2-5, 2025] - We’re pleased to share that our PhD students, Ohad Daniel and Johannes Deufel, presented their work at the Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS 2025) conference. IOTSMS 2025 took place in early December in Lyon, France, and gave us the opportunity to present our work and engage with the community on challenges and innovations around human-in-the-loop methods and automated decision support for Digital Twins. Ohad presented his research, “Automation of Decision Support in Simulation-Based Digital Twins in Manufacturing: A Survey,” and Johannes presented “Exploring Human-in-the-Loop Integration in the Operation of Digital Twin Applications.”

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