This year's edition of the Girls' Day will take place on April 28, 2022 with a contribution by the HCC Research Group.

The Girls' Day is a nationwide project for career and study orientation for girls. On this annual day of action, schoolgirls learn about professions or fields of study in which the proportion of women is less than 40 percent. Companies, businesses, and universities throughout Germany open their doors to girls on Girls' Day to introduce them to careers and courses of study in IT, crafts, science, and technology. 

The research group Human-Centered Computing takes part in this year's Girls' Day with the workshop "Hey Siri, play my favorite song", that offers participants a look behind the scenes of virtual assistants. Over the last two decades, our use of digital technologies has changed dramatically. In our everyday lives, we are accompanied by a large number of virtual assistants that respond to our needs and actions. These assistants respond to certain commands, i.e. actions that we perform. This starts with text entries in a search engine, which presents us with search suggestions even though we haven't even finished writing the search term. Other assistants are able to process voice commands, for example, when we ask Siri to play our favorite song. Despite their omnipresence, many people don't even know that the history of "chatbots", one kind of virtual assistants, goes back to the 1960s. One of the first chatbots was "Eliza", a digital psychotherapist who was supposed to demonstrate how humans and machines could talk to each other.

In the workshop offered by the HCC, researchers of the group invite the participants to look behind the scenes of such virtual assistants. To this end, we will take a closer look at virtual assistants using the example of text-based dialog systems, i.e. chatbots. In addition, we will explore the questions of how chatbots work, what user data is important, and what requirements must be met in order to be able to program a chatbot. Based on a short introduction to chatbots, we approach this topic in an interactive manner in order to finally develop simple dialogs with the participants of the workshop and support them in programming and testing a simple chatbot.

Date: April 28, 2022 from 10:20 am - 11:40 am
Location: online (For more information click here.)

The workshop will be led by the HCC members Katrin Glinka, Diane Linke and Peter Sörries and will be in german.

For more info about the contributions of Freie Universität Berlin to this year's edition of the Girls' Day can be found here.