Teamwork on Digital Transformation Challenges I & II

In this module, students work in interdisciplinary teams to tackle a real-world challenge related to digitalization. Challenges are introduced by members of the Digital Society Initiative (DSI). The challenges run over two semesters, with a 3 ECTS module in fall semester and a follow up module of 6 ECTS module in the spring semester.

The module is open to Master’s students from all disciplines through the School of Transdisciplinary Studies (STS). It is a compulsory module of the DSI Minor/LAO Digital Skills program. Read more about the program here: DSI Minor/LAO Digital Skills

In the Fall semester, students form interdisciplinary teams to innovate a concept addressing a challenge. They then engage with experts from different fields, receiving guidance on digital methods and key ethical, legal, and social considerations. In the Spring semester, students implement their projects with guidance from of their supervisor, a DSI researcher. Throughout the process, the teams draw on their disciplinary expertise, incorporating the newly gained digital skills and interdisciplinary insights. They also develop key soft skills such as teamwork, communication, and project management.

Students meet weekly on Mondays for mandatory sessions called Minor Mondays, designed to keep projects on track and encourage connection, collaboration, and teamwork.

• 14.09.2026: Challenge presentations by the supervisors (see challenges HS26-FS27 below).
• 21.09.2026: Design Thinking Introduction by Nicole Foelsterl | ZHdK
• 19.10. and/or 26.10.2026: Expert Lunches: Each Fall semester, student teams, DSI experts, and outreach partners meet for an exchange to gather feedback and insights from a wide range of perspectives with the aim to strengthen and refine the project concepts.
• 02.11.2026: Design Thinking Workshop given by Nicole Foelsterl | ZHdK
• 30.11.2026: Semester Coffee in a World Café Setting. At the end of the Fall semester, the project concepts are presented and discussed together with the students from the Digital Transformation – a Scientific Overview | Digital Society Initiative | UZH module and the entire Community of Practice (CoP).
• 24.05.2027: Semester Celebration with a Poster Session. At the end the Spring semester, the final projects are presented and celebrated together with the students from the Digital Transformation – an Artistic Reflection | Digital Society Initiative | UZH and the entire Community of Practice (CoP).

All events take place on Mondays. Semester-specific information can be found here (UZH Course Catalogue) and here  (OLAT).

Supervisor: Teodora Vukovic

Topic: «DemocrAI» aims to co-develop a package of AI Tools together with the council of Dübendorf. Practical goal of the project is to create a set of AI-based tools for audiovisual transcription and captioning, summarization of large amounts of documents and RAG systems for information retrieval. This way we aim to support the democratization of AI, as well as the education of the members of the council on how to use the tools in an effective and simple way. This participary process enables trust in the tools and helps to consider important issues like sovereignty, data protection and confidentiality.

Relevant skills: Basic digital and programming skills, at least one of the members should speak (Swiss-)German, interest in learning about user-driven product design, interest and curiosity in ethical, societal, or labor-related aspects of AI.

Supervisor: Zhivko Taushanov

Topic: What can we measure about a court? Formulating empirical hypotheses on decision-making at the Zurich High Court (Obergericht des Kantons Zürich), designing a codebook, and building a quantitative dataset from unstructured judgment text through AI-supported extraction.

Relevant skills: Basic knowledge of quantitative methods and statistics, basic data handling in R or Python, interest in legal data science and empirical legal research; at least one team member with basic legal knowledge and German reading skills.

Supervisor: Vaibhav Krishna & Martin Tomasik

Topic: Social networks play an important role in shaping individual and collective behaviour across domains including sociology, healthcare, education, and sport science. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices provide a low-cost and relatively unobtrusive means of capturing repeated encounters between individuals. However, proximity does not necessarily constitute social interaction, and methodological challenges remain concerning sensing range, signal variability, device placement, temporal resolution, and the interpretation of proximity data as social ties.

Relevant skills: Social network analysis, technical skills for Bluetooth Low Energy devices, data & analytics, ethics & privacy, computational skills.

Supervisor: Chiara de Luca

Topic: Fresh water is one of our planet’s most precious resources, yet significant amounts are lost through aging and leaking infrastructure. This challenge explores how digital technologies such as sensors, AI, and low-power computing could enable earlier leak detection and smarter maintenance of underground water networks.

Relevant skills: Interest in digital transformation and sustainability; willingness to work across disciplines; and ideally, expertise in areas such as AI/data science, sensing, edge computing.

Supervisor: Maria Schüler & Markus Christen

Topic: 

This challenge addresses the growing reliance on general-purpose AI chatbots for consumer health advice and the safety risks this creates for everyday users. 
To investigate this, the project evaluates how effectively models detect implicit medical red flags (like sudden chest pain) in multi-turn, informal conversations and clearly recommends calling emergency services instead of giving generic advice. 
The methodology may combine prompt engineering and safety scoring across major AI models with user-experience evaluations to help build a Swiss Health AI Safety Index.

Relevant skills: Prompt engineering, mixed-methods (qualitative & quantitative) data collection and analysis, health system processes, data privacy, user experience (UX) evaluation, and a strong interest in digital public health and health tech governance.

Supervisor: Oriane Pierrès

Topic: Mental well-being apps are proliferating, but who are they actually designed for? Despite growing demand, the limited research available indicates that most digital mental well-being tools fall short of basic accessibility standards, leaving behind users with disabilities, including those with chronic illness and neurodivergent individuals. Research remains scarce and many questions are still open such as what a truly neuroinclusive mental well-being app would look like.

Relevant skills: Mapping the current accessibility landscape of mental well-being apps, evaluating them against established standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Drawing on this evidence and direct input from people with lived experience, students will then develop a prototype and set of recommendations, a concrete vision for a more inclusive digital future in mental well-being.

Supervisor: Hoda Allahbakhshi

Topic: Public transport in Zurich is dense and highly reliable, but reaching a tram, bus, or train stop is not accessibility-neutral: the «first and last mile» – the walk between a rider’s origin or destination and the nearest stop – is exactly where sidewalk gradients, missing curb cuts, uneven surfaces, and obstructed crossings determine whether someone with a mobility restriction can use public transit at all. Standard journey planners (SBB, ZVV) route people to the nearest stop by walking distance alone, with no information on whether that walk is actually passable for a wheelchair user, a parent with a stroller, or an older adult with a rollator.

Relevant skills: Geography/GIScience (spatial data, network analysis), Computer/Data Science (prototype build), Design/HCI (interface and interaction design), Social Sciences or Gerontology (user research, equity and inclusion perspective).

Supervisor: Antoine Logean & askUZH Team

Topic: You probably use generative AI every day, to summarize, to fix your code, to polish a text. But does it actually help you learn? Research suggests it can do the opposite: a chatbot that instantly hands you the answer removes the retrieval effort your brain needs for long-term retention. Your mission: design and build an agentic study coach inside askUZH that helps students learn more effectively, instead of just faster.

Relevant skills: Learning science & education, AI & conversational systems, design thinking, prototype development, user testing.

Supervisor: Joshua Weidlich

Topic: The goal of this challenge is to conceptualize and prototype an AI Edu Lab: a research platform for running controlled, privacy-conscious studies on how students learn and perform academic tasks with generative AI. A central part of the challenge is that the platform must be designed not only for usability, but also for research quality, transparency, and compliance.

Relevant skills: Education/educational psychology, research methods, human-computer interaction, software engineering, data science / analytics, ethics, privacy, and governance.

Supervisor: Teodora Vukovic

Topic: How is artificial intelligence discussed in Swiss media?

Relevant skills: Familiarity with tools such as SwissDox or the LiRI Corpus Platform (can be learned), background in media/discourse analysis or communication science, basic digital and programming skills, interest and curiosity in ethical, societal, or labor-related aspects of AI.

Supervisor: Marcia Nissen

Topic: Designing and evaluating a holistic digital lifestyle intervention to prevent and manage gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) in vulnerable populations.

Relevant skills: Interest or background in digital health, public health, or women's health; willingness to learn and use a low-code platform to prototype a chatbot-based digital health app (combining scripted logic with GenAI-powered content personalization); knowledge of human-centered design; motivation to conduct literature review, market research, and user research; motivation to think intersectionally and apply equity-by-design principles.

Supervisor: Antoine Logean

Topic: Developing practical AI applications that can detect, support, and improve student wellbeing.

Relevant skills: Background in psychology, understanding of ethics and privacy, familiarity with university mental health services, skills in systematic literature review and risk assessment, knowledge of UX design, experience with LLM programming and data analysis.

Supervisor: Markus Christen

Topic: Exploring normative expectations in language-based human-AI interaction (chatbots/GenAI) and designing an empirical study that assesses moderators and/or mediators of the interaction.

Relevant skills: Background in communication; basic knowledge in statistics, (analytical) philosophy, how chatbots work, and/or experience in experiment design.

Challenge Supervisor: Mario Angst, DSI Community Sustainability

This project tasked students with designing a sustainability-focused intervention for digital device use. They created a platform to help university students choose laptops suited to their needs, reducing unsuitable purchases and electronic waste, and encouraging longer device lifespans for greater environmental impact.

Read more about it on the Laptop Hub website or on the poster (PDF, 1 MB).

Challenge Co-Supervisor:  Marcia Nissen, DSI Community Health

Challenge Co-Supervisor: Tobias Kowatsch, DSI Community Health

In this project, students addressed the women’s health gap by developing strategies to integrate female-specific data into clinical research and digital health technologies. Their work focused on improving understanding and management of women’s health throughout life, aiming to advance sex- and gender-specific digital health solutions for better health outcomes and equity.

Student Testimony: Digital Skills in Action – Our Digital Transformation Challenge Experience

As part of the Digital Skills Master Minor at DSI UZH, we had the chance to dive into a real-world challenge — CyMe [si:][mi:] — supervised by and in collaboration with Dr. Marcia Nissen from the Centre for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI), a joint research initiative of UZH, ETH, and University of St. Gallen. This unique project wasn’t just about finding solutions, but about learning how to work effectively in interdisciplinary and intercultural teams (Gian - MA Major Business & Economics, Chenxi - MA Major Computer Linguistics, Larissa - MA Major Sociology).

What made the experience truly impactful?

• Rotating leadership taught us to share ownership and responsibility
• Communication check-ins helped us stay aligned and avoid delays
• Articulating assumptions early smoothed out our coordination
• Respecting individual working styles strengthened our team spirit

We didn’t just walk away with results — we gained invaluable skills for the workplace: collaboration, adaptability, and navigating complexity across disciplines and backgrounds. The learning curve was steep, and that’s what made it so rewarding.

Thanks to DSI and all the involved researchers for enabling this journey.

Challenge Supervisor: Fabian Winiger, University Research Priority Program «Digital Religion(s)»

While traditional churches see declining attendance, new spiritual practices are flourishing in virtual spaces, where centuries-old traditions of meaning-making are reinvented and lived out creatively. Using VR (Meta Quest 2), the students examined this trend through theology, social anthropology, and media studies.

Students and their challenge supervisor Fabian Winiger reported on their teamwork challenge that focused on the search for meaning in virtual spaces in a video essay.

Read more about the project and watch the video on the URPP Digital Religion(s) Blog.

Challenge Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Janna Hastings, DSI Community Ethics

Challenge Co-Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Soeren Lienkamp, DSI Community Health

Anatomical knowledge and visual understanding are of central importance in medicine and health. In this project, students explored the abilities of AI systems to understand human anatomy through the lens of AI image generation tools. The teamwork challenge resulted in a publication and a follow-up DIZH-funded project.

Learn more about the results:

• Publication: Evaluating Text-to-Image Generated Photorealistic Images of Human Anatomy
• Follow up Project: UnRealBody: Inoculating Young People Against Harm from Unrealistic AI-Based Body Images

Module Team

Prof. Dr. Jan Wegner  is Co-Director of the DSI Minor/LAO Digital Skills and member of the Board of Directors of the Digital Society Initiative (DSI). He holds the «Data Science for Sciences» chair at the DM3L at the University of Zurich as an Associate Professor and is head of the EcoVision Lab. He is responsible for the module Teamwork on Digital Transformation Challenges I & II.

Ursula Brack  is a member of the Managing Office of the DSI and responsible for the study program DSI Minor/LAO Digital Skills. She coordinates the module Teamwork on Digital Transformation Challenges I & II.