Faculty of Engineering

Research Highlights

Since the start of the year, 17 doctoral students, 4 post-doctoral students and 10 professors have been researching themes in the area of social media in the newly established DFG Research Training Group “User-Centered Social Media“ (UCSM). The volume of user-generated content on the Internet is growing steadily. But how are both individual users as well as users as a collective influenced or controlled by this content? USCM scientists are conducting research into the behaviour of users of social media and networks and are deriving user models from this. They also address the analysis of social media and its security and privacy.

INKO department scientists are also involved in the development and evaluation of cloud-based data storage for universities. “Sciebo” allows scientists to store and share large volumes of data. Data confidentiality can be guaranteed by storage on computers of the universities involved. This is difficult to guarantee in the case of commercial offers. A particular focus of the observation was whether and why students and researchers switch from commercial services such as Dropbox or Google to a university service. It was shown that besides data security,  in particular social factors, such as a perceived critical mass of users, were also key to prompting a change.

The Chair of Intelligent Systems has been collaborating over the last 5 years with a steel manufacturer based in Duisburg. In order to achieve quality improvements in the steel produced, new methods have been developed in order to improve the detection of non-metallic inclusions and cracks. This was made possible as a result of the “Combined High-Resolution Imaging and Spectroscopy System” (CHRISS), which is a form of multi and hyperspectral imaging. Based on this imaging, image recognition techniques are able to detect errors in production quickly and in an automated manner.

The Chair is also conducting research into the image analysis of MRT data in collaboration with orthopaedics and accident surgeons at the University Hospital Essen. This allowed precise visualization of the head of the femur and the hip joint socket, and the distance between them. The findings will be used for the diagnosis of femoral acetabular impingement.