Dr.-Ing. Lena Cibulski, postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for Visual Analytics, has been awarded the Fraunhofer ICT Dissertation Award 2025 in recognition of her PhD research. This award is presented annually by the Fraunhofer ICT Group and recognizes outstanding dissertations of its 21 member institutes.
Lena Cibulski studied visualization tools that support the specific needs of experts who make complex decisions based on large data sets in their daily work. Existing decision aids helped decision-makers understand the data but rarely provided dedicated support with core decision activities like an informed balancing of potentially conflicting criteria to find a suitable compromise.
The dissertation investigated how to utilize the individual judgment of decision-makers by graphically presenting the underlying data in a suitable way and making them interactively accessible. Lena Cibulski used approaches from decision theory, cognitive science, and applied visualization research to systematically investigate the requirements of real-world decisions and operationalize them for the design of visualization tools with demonstrated usefulness in industrial practice.
In times where people and processes increasingly tend to employ, and partially rely on, artificial intelligence, it is critically important to investigate how humans and algorithms can optimally exchange information. Lena Cibulski’s findings shape the general understanding of how human knowledge and experience can be used to solve decision problems in an interactive dialog with data and algorithms.
The award ceremony took place on January 27th during this year’s New Year reception of the German Informatics Society and the Fraunhofer ICT Group in Berlin. Learn more about the Fraunhofer ICT Dissertation Award: https://www.iuk.fraunhofer.de/en/about-our-group/ict-dissertation-award.html.