Jun.-Prof. Dr. Steffi Knorn

Institut für Automatisierungstechnik (IFAT)
Fachgebiet für Autonome Systeme in der Automatisierung

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Projekte

Abgeschlossene Projekte

FACE-IT: Fostering Awarenness on program Contents in higher Education using IT tools
Laufzeit: 01.09.2019 bis 31.08.2022

Fostering high-quality Higher Education (HE) requires strengthened quality assurance in the design, implementation, execution and evaluation of HE programs (HEPs). This quality assurance process involves multiple stakeholders with different perspectives and conceptualizations:
- PROGRAM BOARDS plan and design curricula mostly in terms of ILOs, PLOs and TLAs

- ADMINISTRATORS evaluate programs and communicate with other stakeholders
- TEACHERS develop, revise and implement courses, mostly based on the taught procedures and concepts (PCs)
- STUDENTS are naturally inclined to see course and program contents through PCs.

Unfortunately, the efficacy of quality assuring HE is currently limited by the heterogeneity of the tools and conceptualizations of the stakeholders. To improve this, we identify the need for tools that: 1) aid executing the HE quality assurance processes; 2) support decision makers in maintaining HEPs; 3) clarify the relations between ILOs, PLOs, and TLAs to all stakeholders; 4) promote awareness about program contents and their relations; 5) establish a common language among stakeholders.

Our main objective is to develop tools that solve these needs, improve the quality of education and increase the employability of our candidates by helping:
- students to understand how the contents of different courses connect and expand on each other - teachers and program boards to improve their awareness of how course contents flow within the program and contribute to the PLOs

- administrators to inspect and assess program quality
- all stakeholders to establish a common language to ease their communication.
To achieve our goals we involve participants from STEM faculties from different backgrounds, geographic areas, and academic cultures.

The consortium includes:
- NTNU, hosting several educational centers whose scope and expertise overlap with the intentions of the Face-IT project, has considerable expertise in the development and quality assurance of HEPs, and hosts Norway's largest academic environment within teacher education and educational research at the Department of Teacher Education;

- Uppsala University (UU), renown for its excellence in research and teaching and its long lasting traditions, with broad research and development activities in pedagogy, teaching, and related topics;

- University of Padova, with broad expertise in innovative teaching and learning in the framework of active learning, in the development and creation of MOOCs, and with a constant strive for improving teaching and learning, involving students’ voices and promoting change at different levels.

- Otto-von-Guericke University, with a broad expertise in fostering multi-cultural, multi-gender and disparate student audiences in its teaching, and with multi-disciplinary programs that combine several aspects of modern knowledge;

- the Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles, with its peculiarity of offering several interfaculty programs shared with other HE realities, such as the Solvay Business School, and a wide range of multi-disciplinary projects.

Towards our goals, we plan to introduce a language that enables teachers and students to describe program contents in the intuitive terms of PCs and investigate how to connect them to the associated PLOs, ILOs, and TLAs. This language will enable representing the students’ learning process as flows of PCs, that will capture graphically how course contents are expected to ladder in time, and thus represent entire programs in an alternative and quantitatively analysable fashion.

The developed methods will be implemented in easily usable and interpretable IT tools that provide actionable information and decision-making support to each stakeholder. The tools will be tested on several course- and program-wide field tests. All results will be disseminated through two multiplier events at NTNU and UU, and through scientific open access publications and a dedicated project website.

The project will thus produce intellectual outputs including methods to: derive ontological descriptions of PCs in HEPs; merge PCs with TLAs, ILOs, and PLOs into knowledge flow graphs; represent and analyse courses and programs in terms of these flows graphs. These outputs will thus support defining program contents in a way that every stakeholder can relate to, promoting thus acceptance and usage.

This project will revolutionize how to develop, assess and manage HEPs and courses by empowering and engaging the stakeholders with a particular attention to students and teachers: students will indeed be more aware of why they study what they study, enabling them to perform self- assessment on their knowledge in relation to upcoming courses. Teachers will be supported in implementing constructive alignment principles and maintain overall program consistency. Our tools will also help executing quality assurance operations, and help universities to share information among them and with society.

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

Robust Scalability of Multi-Agent Systems
Laufzeit: 01.01.2019 bis 31.12.2021

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are implemented in many different areas and forms in many technical applications today and will become even more important in the future. An important body of work has appeared over the years but many key questions have not been addressed so far.

Consider for instance a simple network of agents, where one is affected by a disturbance. Due to the coupling with other agents, the disturbance will travel through the network. This project will consider the question when and how the local errors grow while the disturbance propagates through the system. We will also develop suitable control algorithms, that can be implemented at the individual agents, to ensure that disturbances are attenuated and that the error signals are bounded independently of the size and the structure of the network. Whether and how this can be achieved will depend on the dynamics of the agents as well as the type of coupling and imperfections in the communication between the agents such as noise, delays or dropouts.

This problem is well known in some networks, i.e. in vehicle platoons, where it is called string stability. Hence, we will combine methods proven to be suitable to study string stability, methods suitable for handling of communication imperfections and results derived for general multi-agent systems. Research in this area will contribute to advances in MAS such as consensus and pinning networks, and will enable safe operation of these networks in realistic settings.

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

Knowledge ladders in engeneering curricula
Laufzeit: 01.07.2019 bis 31.12.2020

In this project, we aim to improve the understanding of how the content and connections between courses in a program contribute to the program learning objectives (PLOs).
For this, we will develop methods to understand, describe, analyse and visualise connections between the contents (such as facts, concepts and procedures), teaching and learning activities and course goals of courses and the PLOs, as well as the relation between courses. We anticipate that this will simplify communication between students, teachers and the program board and facilitate a valuable tool for quality control.

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Hands-on control experiences in high-school: captivating students through balancing robots
Laufzeit: 01.04.2019 bis 31.12.2019

The proposal seeks to develop lab instructions suitable for high school students to conduct a lab project with one of selected balancing robot platforms in order to learn and being exposed to basic control principles in a practical and engaging setting. This is expected to increase interest in control engineering and engineering in general and hence motivate more students to pursue a career in engineering

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

CAMPUS: Changes in Ambition, Motivation and Performance in University Students
Laufzeit: 01.05.2019 bis 31.07.2019

The project aims to investigate how ambitions, motivations, perception and performance differs between university students of different gender, age, background, study program and how they change over time. For this, engineering students of four different programs, namely Engineering physics, Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering BSc and MSc, are studied by means of questionnaires, personal interviews and statistical analysis during their first three years of studies. The findings are expected to shed light on questions such as whether significant differences between the student cohorts exist, for which different stereotypes exist, whether teaching styles and study experience at the university lead to different developments and whether performance and motivation of students can be predicted and improved in order to reduce study times and drop-out rates.

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

PAIGE: Pelvic floor activation through gamified exercising
Laufzeit: 01.07.2018 bis 30.06.2019

Ageing, pregnancies and childbirth cause pelvic floor muscle dysfunctions, that lead to a significant number of women suffering from urinary incontinence (in mild cases) up to uterine prolapses (in the extreme cases). Exercising the pelvic floor muscles (a.k.a. Kegel exercises) would effectively prevent and treat the problem, but many women do not do them because of a combination of poor education, lack of fun, and cultural inhibitions. To change this situation we will exploit a wearable and wirelessly connectable vaginal pressure sensor developed in New Zealand, and create a game that transforms performing Kegel exercises into an engaging and compelling experience. The game will thus include both dedicated gamification mechanisms and medical-oriented user feedback schemes for increasing the intrinsic motivations of the users. Hence, our system will encourage women to maintain proper exercising levels for long-term benefits, and indirectly help society overcome cultural inhibitions by exposition to these topics.

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Smart water networks - Monitoring of drinking water networks through advanced data analysis
Laufzeit: 01.07.2018 bis 30.06.2019

Significant amounts of drinking water are lost due to leaks caused by broken pipes. The time required until pipes and other broken parts are repaired or replaced depends largely on the time needed to detect the fault and to find the location of the leak. This is partly due to the fact that the data is often processed manually using simple methods.

This project aims to reduce the time required to detect and locate faults in the drinking water network. Advanced data analysis is used to develop algorithms for processing data and finding trends that indicate leakage. This enables more automated monitoring of the drinking water network which will reduce the amount of drinking water lost due to leakage.

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

Adaptation of examination form and grading to complexity and ambition level
Laufzeit: 01.01.2018 bis 31.12.2018

The main purpose is to develop effective teaching and examination forms suitable for the prerequisites and ambitions of individual students, as well as clarify the course objectives and its examination for the student. This should lead to a better understanding of the course's conceptual contribution to the engineering role, as well as a more developed self-insight for the student as they plan their studies. The categorization of the learning objectives is based on Bloom's revised taxonomy and teaching methods and the examination is designed according to the complexity of the learning objectives. The knowledge goals are hereby more clearly defined for the different grades, which makes it easier for the students who are satisfied with a simple pass grade as well as students aiming for higher grades.

The project will develop a model for how the teaching can be divided into a necessary part in order to pass the course and the pieces that are desirable but not necessary for passing and thereby qualify for receiving a higher grade, and link exam forms to the various parts. Since students from several different engineering programs will be tested, the project will provide a broad knowledge of how different concepts, teaching methods / layouts and its examination interact for students from different programs, which may differ significantly in their mathematical background.

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

CITE: Developing a Concept Inventory Tool for Engineering
Laufzeit: 01.07.2017 bis 31.12.2018

The project aims to develop a concept inventory that assesses the acquisition of important concepts and program goals of the Electrical Engineering program. The consistent use of such a test would provide students with feedback on where there are on their learning path in relation to the wider context of their program; teachers with a way of monitoring the students’ progression towards reaching specific program goals and a possibility to adapt teaching; and the program board with an effective tool for evaluating course content and the structure of the program in relation to the program goals.

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Advancing System Integration in Process Industry: Sensor Data Gathering, Wireless Networking, and Supervisory Control
Laufzeit: 01.07.2015 bis 30.06.2018

The project idea is to enable completely new possibilities for integrating novel monitoring, maintenance, reconfiguration, and supervision functionalities for wireless control solutions in the process industry. The potential of the project is immense in that it is likely to produce world class research of significant industrial value, which will provide superior and highly innovative wireless automation solutions built on new data gathering and sensor communication technologies, improved protocol- and routing schemes, fault-tolerant supervisory control and reconfigurations and effective and efficient system integration. The team behind the project, who has collaborated closely previously, consists of the Signals and Sytems Group at UU, headed by Prof Anders Ahle´n, the Network Control Group at KTH headed by Prof Karl Henrik Johansson, the Control and Communications groups at ABB Corporate Research, represented by Global Research Area Managers Alf Isaksson and Stefan Svensson, and Holmen Iggesund represented by Automation Engineer Thomas Lindh. Some of the research ideas behind this project were developed by the team in the VINNOVA WiComPI-project and are now ready to be taken closer to commercialization.

Projekt im Forschungsportal ansehen

Publikationen

2020

Buchbeitrag

Using different taxonomies to formulate learning outcomes to innovate engineering curriculum towards pbl: Perspectives from engineering educators

Staffas, Kjell; Knorn, Steffi; Carvalho Guerra, Aida Olivia Pereira; Varagnolo, Damiano; Teixeira, André

In: Educate for the future - Aalborg : Aalborg University Press ; Guerra, Aida . - 2020, S. 310-320

2019

Buchbeitrag

Courses-concepts-graphs as a tool to measure the importance of concepts in university programmes

Fjällström, Eva; Forsberg, Christoffer; Trulsson, Felix; Knorn, Steffi; Staffas, Kjell; Varagnolo, Damiano; Wrigstad, Tobias

In: 2019 18th European Control Conference (ECC)/ European Control Conference - [Piscataway, NJ]: IEEE; Garofalo, Franco, S. 3076-3083[Konferenz: 18th European Control Conference, ECC, Naples, Italy, 25-28 June 2019]