The increasing availability of vast quantities of data from various sources significantly impacts the insurance industry, although this industry has always been data driven. It accelerates manual processes and enables new products or business models. On the other hand, it also burdens insurance analysts and other users that need to cope with this development parallel to other global changes. A novel information system (IS) for artificial intelligence (AI)-supported big data analysis, introduced within this paper, shall help to overcome user overload and to empower human data analysts in the insurance industry. The IS research’s focus lies neither in novel algorithms nor datasets but in concepts that combine AI and big data analysis for synergies, such as usability enhancements. For this purpose, this paper systematically designs and implements an AI2VIS4BigData reference model to help information systems conform to automatically detect anomalies and increase its users’ confidence and efficiency. Practical relevance is assured by an interview with an insurance analyst to verify the demand for the developed system and derive all requirements from two insurance industry user stories. A core contribution is the introduction of the IS. Another significant contribution is an extension of the AI2VIS4BigData service-based architecture and user interface (UI) concept on AI and machine learning (ML)-based user empowerment and data transformation. The implemented prototype was applied to synthetic data to enable the evaluation of the system. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations confirm the system’s usability and applicability to the insurance domain yet reveal the need for improvements toward bigger quantities of data and further evaluations with a more extensive user group.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data Analysis are both trending research areas that can be applied to any application domain to increase efficiency, quality, or bridge supply shortages. An example is the analysis of medical information in health informatics and its subdomains bioinformatics and medical informatics. It aims to explore medical information like, e.g., patient data or clinical studies in order to support medical doctors, healthcare professionals, and ultimately all patients. The increasing level of digitization of people's lives and global pandemics boost the relevance of this research area even further. This paper analyzes a medical information use case in order to extend and improve an existing Information System for AI-based Visual Big Data Analysis with a special focus on user empowerment. In more detail, this paper extends a software architecture, introduces a reference implementation, and refines the underlying reference model AI2VIS4BigData. It focuses on supporting both, expert users with profound technical knowledge and end users without that expertise. The resulting concepts and implementations are consequently evaluated with both target groups: A cognitive walkthrough with a group of AI and Big Data Analysis experts confirms the system's usability and a survey with medical doctors and health domain experts (potential end users) positively evaluates the developed concepts.

Climate change means coping directly or indirectly with extreme weather conditions for everybody. Therefore, analyzing meteorological data to create precise models is gaining more importance and might become inevitable. Meteorologists have extensive domain knowledge about meteorological data yet lack practical data analysis skills. This paper presents a method to bridge this gap by empowering the data knowledge carriers to analyze the data. The proposed system utilizes symbolic AI, a knowledge base created by experts, and a recommendation expert system to offer suiting data analysis methods or data pre-processing to meteorologists. This paper systematically analyzes the target user group of meteorologists and practical use cases to arrive at a conceptual and technical system design implemented in the CAMeRI prototype. The concepts in this paper are aligned with the AI2VIS4BigData Reference Model and comprise a novel first-order logic knowledge base that represents analysis methods and related pre-processings. The prototype implementation was qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated. This evaluation included recommendation validation for real-world data, a cognitive walkthrough, and measuring computation timings of the different system components.

Manual labeling and categorization are extremely time-consuming and, thus, costly. AI and ML-supported information systems can bridge this gap and support labor-intensive digital activities. Since it requires categorization, coding-based analysis, such as qualitative content analysis, reaches its limits with large amounts of data and could benefit from AI and ML-based support. Empirical social research, its application domain, benefits from Big Data’s ability to create more extensive human behavior and development models. A range of applications are available for statistical analysis to serve this purpose. This paper aims to implement an information system that supports researchers in empirical social research in performing AI-supported qualitative content analysis. AI2VIS4BigData is a reference model that standardizes use cases and artifacts for Big Data information systems that integrate AI and ML for user empowerment. Thus, this work’s concepts and implementations try to achieve an AI2VIS4BigData-compliant information system that supports social researchers in categorizing text data and creating insightful dashboards. Thereby, the text categorization is based on an existing ML component. Furthermore, it presents two evaluations that were conducted for these concepts and implementations: a qualitative cognitive walkthrough assessing the system’s usability and a quantitative user study with 18 participants revealed that though the users perceive AI support as more efficient, they need more time to reflect on the recommendations. The research revealed that AI support increased the correctness of the users’ categorizations but also slowed down their decision-making. The assumption that this is due to the UI design and additional information for processing requires follow-up research.