Engineering

The Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science has successfully strengthened its profile in its main areas of research, Interactive Systems and Media and Networked World. In the first area, the Department’s innovative organisational structure, which includes professorships in Computer Science and in Psychology, received an exceptionally positive review by external peers. As a consequence, this area is to be extended by an additional professorship in Psychology with an interdisciplinary orientation. Major research themes in this area are human-computer interaction, interactive learning and teaching systems, information retrieval and social media. Entertainment-related applications and computer games have also been gaining importance as a field of research. This has resulted in a new professorship in Entertainment Computing (Professor Maic Masuch). Game-related research as well as the pooling of computer science and psychological competences constitute unique features of the Department by comparison with other German universities.
The research area of Networked World has been extended with a professorship in Embedded Systems (Professor Pedro José Marrón). Methods and techniques for comprehensive, interoperable networking of physical objects, internet-based services and human actors lie at the centre of 
the research activities in this particular area. The Internet of Things, security and reliability, and intelligent technical systems are just some of the research projects in progress here.
Current fields of application addressed in the two main areas of research are medicine and healthcare, mobility, in particular electric mobility, and industrial processes. Further applications include supporting knowledge-intensive collaborative work and providing solutions for e-learning, electronic business and smart living environments.