Engineering

Outlook

INKO will continue to grow in the coming years. An appointment will be made in Interactive Systems and Media to a new professorship for ­social media. The professorship in Economic Psychology will also be filled, and a new professorship for formal methods of computer science will be established in the field of engineering informatics.

A variety of new research projects were secured by the Department’s researchers. High Performance Computing joined with Fluid Dynamics from the Department of Mechanical and Process ­Engineering and the Faculty of Mathematics at the TU Dortmund University to secure the MERCUR project “VINDDKanal – Virtual Interactive ­Numerical Dortmund-Duisburg Wind Tunnel”. In Theoretical Informatics the DFG approved ­the “GaReV – Graphs, Recognizability and Verification” project. Social Psychology: Media and Communication and Co-operative and Collaborative Learning in Intelligent Distributed Environments also had a MERCUR project approved in collaboration with researchers from RUB. There the project will investigate “Pedagogic and ­technological concepts for cooperative learning in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)”.

The Department will continue to extend its research on “User-centred Social Media”, examining how social networks and social media can be used to deliver better and more reliable information. The work simultaneously explores ways of guaranteeing privacy and reliability. For users, a maximum degree of transparency is necessary so that they can see how their data is being processed and on what basis automatic systems make recommendations on their behalf.