Personal space, also known as peripersonal space, is crucial in human social interaction, influencing comfort, communication, and social stress. Estimating and respecting personal space is essential for enhancing human-computer interaction (HCI) and smart environments. Personal space preferences vary due to individual traits, cultural background, and contextual factors. Advanced multimodal sensing technologies, including eye-tracking and wristband sensors, offer opportunities to develop adaptive systems that dynamically adjust to user comfort levels. Integrating physiological and behavioral data enables a deeper understanding of spatial interactions. This study develops a sensor-based model to estimate comfortable personal space and identifies key features influencing spatial preferences. Our findings show that multimodal sensors, particularly eye-tracking and physiological wristband data, can effectively predict personal space preferences, with eye-tracking data playing a more significant role. An experimental study involving controlled human interactions demonstrates that a Transformer-based model achieves the highest predictive accuracy (F1 score: 0.87) for estimating personal space. Eye-tracking features, such as gaze point and pupil diameter, emerge as the most significant predictors, while physiological signals from wristband sensors contribute marginally. These results highlight the potential for AI-driven personalization of social space in adaptive environments, suggesting that multimodal sensing can be leveraged to develop intelligent systems that optimize spatial arrangements in workplaces, educational institutions, and public settings. Future work should explore larger datasets, real-world applications, and additional physiological markers to enhance model robustness.

This paper presents a retrospective overview of a decade of research in our department towards self-organizing personal knowledge assistants in evolving corporate memories. Our research is typically inspired by real-world problems and often conducted in interdisciplinary collaborations with research and industry partners. We summarize past experiments and results comprising topics like various ways of knowledge graph construction in corporate and personal settings, Managed Forgetting and (Self-organizing) Context Spaces as a novel approach to Personal Information Management (PIM) and knowledge work support. Past results are complemented by an overview of related work and some of our latest findings not published so far. Last, we give an overview of our related industry use cases including a detailed look into CoMem, a Corporate Memory based on our presented research already in productive use and providing challenges for further research. Many contributions are only first steps in new directions with still a lot of untapped potential, especially with regard to further increasing the automation in PIM and knowledge work support.

FedEx subsidiary FedEx Ground has implemented a new AI-enabled robotics system to handle thousands of small packages daily as it seeks new innovations to meet demand in e-commerce delivery. The trial Robotic Product Sortation and Identification (RPSi) scheme, which is up and running at FedEx Ground's station in Queens New York, is in partnership with Berkshire Grey, a developer of Intelligent Enterprise Robotics solutions. Berkshire Grey's RPSi system can autonomously pick, identify, sort, collect and containerise small packages at scale, a process that is traditionally processed and sorted manually. The system can handle a wide array of routine packages, including individual polybags, tubes, padded mailers, and more. FedEx says the new technology will introduce the necessary efficiencies to accommodate the rapid growth in e-commerce, autonomously handling thousands of packages a day and sorting them for onward transit to hubs and stations throughout the FedEx Ground network.

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced that it joining Andreas Dengel to get AI into more people's hands while advances are made in the technology. Dengel is a German computer scientist and university lecturer as well as site manager of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, which was founded in 1988. NVIDIA has joined him and his roughly 1,000 colleagues as a shareholder in DFKI. "A study last week said many companies are collecting data, but they don't know what to do with it. We can help them join an increasingly data-driven economy," said Dengel.

This paper presents the first results of the research into AI-based support of the room configuration process during the early design phases in architecture. Room configuration (also: room layout or space layout) is an essential stage of the initial design phase: its results are crucial for user-friendliness and success of the planned utilization of the architectural object. Our approach takes into account different possible actions of the configuration process, such as adding, removing, or (re)assigning of the room type. Its mode of operation is based on specific process chain clusters, where each cluster represents a contextual subset of previous configuration steps and provides a recurrent neural network trained on this cluster data only to suggest the next step, and a case base that is used to determine if the current process chain belongs to this cluster. The most similar cluster then tries to suggest the next step of the process. The approach is implemented in a distributed CBR framework for support of early conceptual design in architecture and was evaluated with a high number of process chain queries to prove its general suitability.

Trends like digital transformation even intensify the already overwhelming mass of information knowledge workers face in their daily life. To counter this, we have been investigating knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. In this paper, we give an overview of solutions we have found during the last five years as well as challenges that still need to be tackled. Additionally, we share experiences gained with the prototype of a first forgetful information system used 24/7 in our daily work for the last three years. We also address the untapped potential of more explicated user context as well as features inspired by Memory Inhibition, which is our current focus of research.

Knowledge workers face an ever increasing flood of information in their daily lives. To counter this and provide better support for information management and knowledge work in general, we have been investigating solutions inspired by human forgetting since 2013. These solutions are based on Semantic Desktop (SD) and Managed Forgetting (MF) technology. A key concept of the latter is the so-called Memory Buoyancy (MB), which is intended to represent an information item's current value for the user and allows to employ forgetting mechanisms. The SD thus continuously performs information value assessment updating MB and triggering respective MF measures. We extended an SD-based organizational memory system, which we have been using in daily work for over seven years now, with MF mechanisms directly embedding them in daily activities, too, and enabling us to test and optimize them in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first present our initial version of MB and discuss success and failure stories we have been experiencing with it during three years of practical usage. We learned from cognitive psychology that our previous research on context can be beneficial for MF. Thus, we created an advanced MB version especially taking user context, and in particular context switches, into account. These enhancements as well as a first prototypical implementation are presented, too.

Existing Semantic Desktops are still reproached for being too complicated to use or not scaling well. Besides, a real "killer app" is still missing. In this paper, we present a new prototype inspired by NEPOMUK and its successors having a semantic graph and ontologies as its basis. In addition, we introduce the idea of context spaces that users can directly interact with and work on. To make them available in all applications without further ado, the system is transparently integrated using mostly standard protocols complemented by a sidebar for advanced features. By exploiting collected context information and applying Managed Forgetting features (like hiding, condensation or deletion), the system is able to dynamically reorganize itself, which also includes a kind of tidy-up-itself functionality. We therefore expect it to be more scalable while providing new levels of user support. An early prototype has been implemented and is presented in this demo.