Projects Involving the Research Professor for Educational Technologies in Digital Transformation
Project ExPro
Increasing reliance on complex algorithmic processes is exacerbating the challenges for employees with diverse qualifications and managers to reach consensus and coordinate action in specific everyday situations.
Quite often, the quality of basic data, results or processes must be assessed to make informed decisions that align with the objectives of the business. Machine learning (ML) makes it possible to make these evaluations on the basis of complex and comprehensive input data derived from operational and production datasets.
However, insufficient transparency and traceability make it difficult to deploy practically and hinder its acceptance in SMEs.
Technological approaches, such as explainable AI (XAI), address these weakness, but they need to be supplemented. The aim of ExPro is therefore the collaborative analysis of forecast results down to their source data in order to support decision-making based on ML forecasts.
Project Management:
Project Staff:
Robin Walkenhorst
Julian Kamphausen
Project Duration:
1 April 2021 to 30 September 2023
Sponsored by:
Future Center AI NRW
We believe that artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalization will increase companies' competiveness and make work better. This requires an innovative, practice-oriented and people-centric approach that embraces exploration of new avenues without hesitation. This is the vision of the Zukunftszentrum ki NRW (site in German) and its six consortium partners.
Project Management:
Zentrum für Innovation und Technik in NRW
Project Partners:
FernUniversität in Hagen
Bildungswerk der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Wirtschaft e. V.
agentur mark GmbH
Technologieberatungsstelle beim DGB NRW e. V.
Project Duration:
1 January 2023 to 31 December 2026
Sponsored by:
Project What2Study
Central student advisory services (Zentrale Studienberatungen ZSB) are usually the first port of call for German university students with questions regarding their courses and studying. As “guideposts” in their respective universities, ZSBs offer a broad range of services for student orientation. The intelligent integration of conversational agents (such as chatbots or voicebots) can simplify communication with potential students and make the whole process easier to manage. The goal is to answer questions on generic topics and make simple appointments by using artifical intelligence, in order to ensure that qualified specialists are available to provide targeted advice where it is needed as quickly as possible.
The project will explore how conversational agents can be used to this end as a supplement to the ZSBs classic communications channels, how this can be implemented and introduced across North Rhine-Westphalia. Working together with staff from the ZSBs, possible content and application areas will be worked out for the conversational agent. This content will result in requirements that will be realized and implemented as modules.
During a pilot phase, the cross-university core functionalities of the conversational agents will be tested and optimized. The second half of the project will investigate how ZSBs can be enabled to carry out simple adjustments to their own conversational agents and thus enable more highly detailed content on individual courses or locations. The possibility of simple content maintenance and the adaptation of smaller functionalities also provides a sustainability perspective for the project beyond the actual project duration. The new form of communication tested within the project makes a direct contribution to the state initiative “Kein Abschluss ohne Anschluss” (No degree without a future – KAoA) by strengthening the transition from school to university. Through this initiative, young people across the state receive support in navigating study and career options, selecting courses and universities, and embarking on their academic journey.
Project Management:
Project Staff:
Torsten Schneider
Project Duration:
1 April 2023 to 31 December 2024
Sponsored by:
Project SkaLab
Joint project: Scalable center for the production of sheet metal body components (Skalierbares Zentrum für die Herstellung von Karosseriebauteilen aus Blech - SkaLaB)
In the future, companies in the automotive industry, SMEs in particular, will need to take action to maintain their autonomy by increasing their openness to technology and accelerating digitalization. In the process, the significance of flexible manufacturing techniques that enable the reconfiguration of production will continue to grow. The product portfolio that is generally passed on to suppliers by OEMs for production, very often includes bodywork components that may not always be economically feasible to manufacture using the existing production technology available at supplier SMEs. The reason for this is often the high number of variants and the small batch sizes.
Instead of producing these kinds of batches as part of large orders in an expensive and unprofitable manner, a more attractive and profitable approach for medium-sized suppliers involves manufacturing geometrically individualized components with increased flexibility in terms of variants and capacity.
This sub-project being investigated at the FernUniversität in Hagen addresses various aspects of the above-mentioned problem. In order to implement flexible production and ensure reliable and cost-effective manufacturing of parts in small quantities, geometric features from CAD drawings need to be captured (semi-)automatically. This enables effective control of the process chain that is based on these features. This functionality will result in an AI module that not only records features as automatically as possible, but also generates the corresponding process.
Project Management:
Project Staff:
Project Duration:
1 April 2023 to 31 December 2025
Sponsored by:
