Faculty of Engineering

Cooperation and International Work

As part of a DAAD-funded collaboration between the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of Chile, practically-oriented forms of teaching have been developed and implemented as pilot events in Chile. A delegation of PhD students led by Prof. Torsten Zesch established a collaborative project with the “Digital Research Centre of Sfax” in Tunisia. Ideas have been shared around the topic of social media and the collaboration has been consolidated.

In 2015, Prof. Nicole Krämer from the Chair of “Social Psychology, Media and Communication” spent a sabbatical semester at Stanford University, USA. She conducted an empirical study with Prof. Jeremy Bailenson, in which immersive virtual reality was used in order to change individual communication behaviour. The conversation partners’ avatars were represented with a smile that was more pronounced than in reality, and this was shown to have positive consequences. Potential applications might involve compensation of the social competency deficits of conversation partners, who are involved in interactions taking place in virtual reality, by means of “virtual augmentation”.