Covid-19 made us realize that educational practices in higher education must change AND can change. A possible solution for practicing lab work is working in a remote lab: a real lab in which students and the equipment/instruments are physically apart. The concept of printed touchless electronics was taken as the leading principle for students in the Department of Electrical Engineering of a university of applied sciences. They got the assignment to write a programming code, with which they could control a robot. This robot was supposed to draw, with conductive ink, a pattern, that could function as a printed (light) sensor. The robot was situated in the lab, the students uploaded their code from home. Via a live stream, the students could follow the movements of the robot and the pen. From a didactical perspective, the goal was to find out if the selected didactical methods: teamwork and feedback via an internet platform and working with consultation hours, had the estimated effect. An interdisciplinary team of three lecturers was composed to guide the students. Students thought that the consultation hours were very helpful. The online teamwork between the students did not work so well. In the future, students would like to have more opportunities for testing and working with the remote lab.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher education (HE) to shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT), subsequently influencing academic belonging and social integration, as well as challenging students' engagement with their studies. This study investigated influences on student engagement during ERT, based on student resilience. Serial mediation analyses were used to test the predictive effects between resilience, academic belonging, social integration, and engagement.
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Within this research a smart textile based light sensor was developed and integrated into a technical demonstrator of a remote identification system. This sensor is based on polymeric optical fibers (POFs) which contain fluorescent dopants and allows a remote detection using an optical laser pulse for identification. A possible use case for this system is remote identification to avoid “friendly fire” incidents.The smart textile sensor can be integrated with a very low footprint in protective textiles or other equipment of the individual. Besides defense applications, the system could also be adopted for applications in which a safe, secure and fast remote identification is needed.
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Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.
The integration of renewable energy resources, controllable devices and energy storage into electricity distribution grids requires Decentralized Energy Management to ensure a stable distribution process. This demands the full integration of information and communication technology into the control of distribution grids. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is used to communicate measurements and commands between individual components and the control server. In the future this control is especially needed at medium voltage and probably also at the low voltage. This leads to an increased connectivity and thereby makes the system more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. According to the research agenda NCSRA III, the energy domain is becoming a prime target for cyber-attacks, e.g., abusing control protocol vulnerabilities. Detection of such attacks in SCADA networks is challenging when only relying on existing network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Although these systems were designed specifically for SCADA, they do not necessarily detect malicious control commands sent in legitimate format. However, analyzing each command in the context of the physical system has the potential to reveal certain inconsistencies. We propose to use dedicated intrusion detection mechanisms, which are fundamentally different from existing techniques used in the Internet. Up to now distribution grids are monitored and controlled centrally, whereby measurements are taken at field stations and send to the control room, which then issues commands back to actuators. In future smart grids, communication with and remote control of field stations is required. Attackers, who gain access to the corresponding communication links to substations can intercept and even exchange commands, which would not be detected by central security mechanisms. We argue that centralized SCADA systems should be enhanced by a distributed intrusion-detection approach to meet the new security challenges. Recently, as a first step a process-aware monitoring approach has been proposed as an additional layer that can be applied directly at Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, this allows purely local consistency checks. Instead, we propose a distributed and integrated approach for process-aware monitoring, which includes knowledge about the grid topology and measurements from neighboring RTUs to detect malicious incoming commands. The proposed approach requires a near real-time model of the relevant physical process, direct and secure communication between adjacent RTUs, and synchronized sensor measurements in trustable real-time, labeled with accurate global time-stamps. We investigate, to which extend the grid topology can be integrated into the IDS, while maintaining near real-time performance. Based on topology information and efficient solving of power flow equation we aim to detect e.g. non-consistent voltage drops or the occurrence of over/under-voltage and -current. By this, centrally requested switching commands and transformer tap change commands can be checked on consistency and safety based on the current state of the physical system. The developed concepts are not only relevant to increase the security of the distribution grids but are also crucial to deal with future developments like e.g. the safe integration of microgrids in the distribution networks or the operation of decentralized heat or biogas networks.
phōnē – Giving Minority Languages a Voice is a project application to safeguards and promotes cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. We will connect people who belong to a language minority in their countries with European values across language and cultural borders. 10 institutions will cooperate for the first time, breaking new ground for the RML theatre sector and improving their standing nationallyand internationally. phōnē will be the first ever major international collaboration between theatres working for minority languages.“Languages are vehicles of our cultures, collective memory and values. They are an essential component of our identities, and a building block of our diversity and living heritage.”The loss of a language means not only the loss of a basic element of communication, but also of a complete system of knowledge developed over time. The disappearance of a language also means the loss of a unique, unrecoverable universe associated with a particular environment. It means the loss of diversity.Phōnē wants to make an active contribution to the vitalisation of endangered minority languages. In order to keep endangered languages alive, theatre is one of the most suitable media because it provides a space for language, but also because it uses non-language-based forms of communication. In this way, theatre in particular makes it easier for people who do not yet have a confident knowledge of theminority language to get started. This will safeguard cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. Strengthening the cultures and their languages will also strengthen the economic basis of the theatres working in these minority languages.phōnē is aiming for three main objectives to strengthen theatre in its role of vitalising endangered minority languages.A – Giving Minority Languages a voiceTogether we will search for narratives that tell about the people in their minority language region. Thestories are about and from people who live and work in remote regions of Europe and are written anddeveloped in the respective minority language.B – Giving Minority Languages a European stageThe developed texts need a stage to reach the widest possible audience. As different as the expectednarratives will be, so different will be the stages (outreach / site-specific / digital) on which they are presented.Different formats support the goal of addressing the broadest possible audience in the communitiesand involving them both passively and actively in the use of their minority language.
