Computers have expanded into more and more areas of life. They are already omnipresent in many parts of our private and professional everyday life.

While personal desktop computers (PCs) have been playing a major role over the last decades, today a shift from classical desktop computers towards distributed, mobile, and embedded devices is becoming apparent, computerizing the users environment. The way people interact with their environment using this digital media poses a number of challenges for modern computer science.

These challenges are subject of active scientific research under a couple of different keywords: Mobile Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Ubiquitous Computing, or Pervasive Computing. While focussing on slightly different aspects, all these areas of research share the fundamental question, how digital media can be shaped in the future to the benefit of the user and how applications can be mapped to the new technological possibilities.

Within the Graduate School Digital Media these topics shall be researched following an application-oriented approach and according to their interdisciplinary nature. Scholarship holders will be accompanied by an integrated course program featuring topics from adjacent disciplines.

Advances in Digital Media

Funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation

Speaker

Prof. Dr. Rainer Malaka
Phone: +49 421 218-64402
Fax: +49 421 218-8751
e-mail:

Cooperations

Besides the University of Bremen, the Graduate School Digital Media works in close cooperation with following organizations:

HfK Bremen (University Of The Arts)
Hochschule Bremen
EML Research, Heidelberg
European Media Laboratory, Heidelberg

Research Program

Application areas

The subject areas of the Graduate School Digital Media on the one hand are very scientifically demanding and on the other hand they are also of immense practical relevance.

The field of research is divided into the following application areas:

• Digital media for private users: focusing for example on mobile information systems for the everyday life, e.g., city guides or information portals, but also on means for controlling electronic devices at home.
• Digital media in the industry: investigating how users in a professional environment, often interacting with devices by means of software interfaces, can be supported with their tasks reliably and safely.
• Digital media in education: many so-called ‘e-learning’ systems for education and training have only been moderately successful in the past often being limited to recording courses. However, there are many approaches to successfully applying digital media in education and training for adults and children as well.
• Interactive media in art and entertainment: creative approaches for creating and designing digital media spawn new ideas and possiblities, either focusing more on entertainment as in games or on knowledge and experience transfer, e.g., as in a museum.