embedded ethics is an approach where lecturers in all courses are discussing ethics aspects regarding their own subject. a number of studies [eg. 1, 2] have been conducted indicating that this is a better approach than offering a seperated »ethics in technology« course.
some universities have created extensive »open source« repositories of the materials created by and for various lectureres that showcase the inclusion of ethics aspects into all kinds of subjects.
in this bachelor- or master thesis project, these materials will be examined for the use in teaching in mandatory courses of the TU wien informatics bachelor program. basically, each course at TU wien will be matched with appropriate entries in the repositories; then, the content of these entries will be translated and localized, and, where appropriate, materials will be produced. the results of these process will be documented in a format that also will have to be developed, and made available to the lecturers in the respective courses.
additional councelling by our resident AI ethics professor will be available.
It is completely unthinkable that somebody studies physics without learning about Gallileo or Newton, or philosophy without thinking about what Socrates or Kant wrote. Unfortunately, it is quite common to study informatics without knowing anything about the history of the discipline, or the origin of the ideas and concepts of informatics.
As a consequence, a lazy default story about US-american startups, run by white men, has taken hold. Since this is neither accurate nor flattering for the discipline, this master thesis project is focussed on the goal to picture a more inclusive story of the history of the IT industry, of the field of informatics, and of the ideas in this field. from this research, a card game (eg. trading card game), maybe based on a fantasy theme (like pride, prejudice and zombies) or similar to pokemon etc. should be designed and, ideally, deployed and evaluated.
while the game should be a real-world card game, it could have a digital component via QR codes or NFC tags.
i am having a short break from TU wien. i will return in fall 2024, probably with all-new topics then. for now, this place is closed.
Compared to online systems for collaborative authoring like the google office suite or miro, collaborative annotations of and communication about online documents is still quite underdeveloped. Medium tries to do a some highlight-sharing and inline annotation stuff which is certainly interesting, but maybe there is more.
If we consider reading documents not as a passive consumption of text, but an active process of structuring, organization and annotation (like it would be i a learning context), even more possibilities open up.
This master thesis for one or two candidates tries to develop a prototype of a system where readers collaboratively work with a given document with the goal to not only understand it, but enhance it with eg. current events, connotations, crosslinks to other materials, links into the internet etc.
Ultimately, the goal is to create an environment where the barriers between the roles of teachers and students get torn down, and both groups can benefit from each other.
Mastodon is a federated platform inspired by twitter (maybe). it is open source, open data format, and more or less surveillance free. Because this approach, conversations are more civil and often much more interesting than on big-tech-owned social media platforms. Unfortunately, current Mastodon clients make it hard to participate in these conversations, as they are shown as long linear lists, while they are often hierarchical.
The goal of this bachelor thesis project for a small team, or master thesis for one student is to design, implement and evaluate an iPad client based on a discourse visualization developed for the reddit client biscuit for reddit ca. 10 years ago (also in the course of a master thesis). The design has to be adapted to the unique affordances of Mastodon. Necessary hardware (iPad etc.) can be supplied by us.
If successful, the app can be maintained as a shared (commercial) project beyond the scope of the thesis.
In Denkweisen der Informatik (ways of thinking in informatics), a unique first-semester course for all informatics bachelor students at TU Wien, we organized (more or less) weekly panel discussions where experts of the respective fields answer and discuss the students’ questions. To collect the questions, we use the Q&A-Tool of the zoom webinar format.
While this is readily available, it has some serious drawbacks, eg. questions can only be submitted once the webinar has started, while it would be helpful if students could post questions whenever they have them.
The goal of this master thesis project is to design and implement a little platform (probably using django) that mirrors the possibilities of the Zoom Q&A-tool and extends them in the direction we need it. There are some role models, like mentimeter, mukana or the old best and worst of informatics tool we used when Aurora was still around, but basically this should be designed from ground up along the necessities of its intended use.
A format to translate lecture slides into a semi-booklike format has been developed and refined over the recent years. An example can be seen here:
https://dwi.lva.tuwien.ac.at/dwi20221117.html
Slidebooks are created using a convoluted pipeline of processing steps, from the creation of slides in Apple Keynote, the annotation of these slides using the »presenter notes« functionality in Keynote, the extraction of all content from Keynote using AppleScript, ImageMagick and curl and the encoding into a text-only format, to a python script that creates an HTML + javascript-file that can then be uploaded to a web server.
This pipeline is not only relatively slow, unreliable and error-prone, it is also a nightmare to maintain and update. The goal of this master thesis for one person is to take everything that has been learned so far, completely rethink the process and create a »service« that makes it easy to create slideBooks.
In addition, new elements for SlideBooks that enhance the interactivity (like quizzes, crosslinks between slidebooks, gameful elements) should be devised, designed and prototyped or implemented.
smart phones are amazing collections of sensor technologies. can these sensors, especially location, orientation and maybe the camera be used to facilitate new forms of teaching and learning in the course »ways of thinking in informatics« (denkweisen der informatik).
the goal of this bachelor or master thesis is to find a simple and easy to adapt strategie that can be used to create »distribued« learning units. this includes looking at existing approaches like educaching, QR rallys or hybrid scavenger hunts,, designing and implementing elements of an approach that is easy to maintain and fill with content, and evaluate those elements with students in the context of a large first-year informatics course.
cory doctorow is an science fiction/tech fiction author creating books in amazing frequency. some of his books are set in a near future where the technologies seem absolutely realistic or at least almost possible. this diploma thesis will explores how realistic those the technologies really are? using some of his works as a starting point (esp. the trilogy little brother, homeland and attack surface as well as walkaway and the novella-collection radicalized) the work should examine how much of the technology described in a »near future« settings are attainable or available today. if they don’t exist, could they be implemented/created? should they exist? the work should pose and answer technological, ethical and political questions regarding the concepts of his books. ideally, a particularily interesting technology is implemented in a prototypical way.
since the beginning of the scientific revolution, the publication of information – insights, knowledge, theories, etc. – was one of the main driving forces of science. it can be argued that the scientific revolution was fuelled by a rebellion of newton’s contemporaries against secrecy and private profiteering as much as a different way of thinking.
for centuries, the format of the printed scientific article has been refined into a number of different standardised layouts (dependent eg. on the branch of science, or the publishing medium) and conventions (eg. for citations, or for the order of authors. then, the internet came along and, over night, made that all obsolete — only that it didn’t. scientific publishing is still defined by the format of the printed paper, creating a number of problems in the digital.
it is time to rethink scientific publishing formats.
in a digital-first publication format, references could not only refer to other work, they could refer to the very sentences and words of a quoted article; the multitude of reading devices, from smart phones to 4k screens and beyond, deserve optimised presentations of text and images depending on the strengths of each screen; printed versions could flow into the various standard paper sizes; and since scientific work often gets refined, revised, and discussed, we could even think about ways to reflect this in a new format.
the goal of this diploma thesis (and beyond?) is to define a new standard digital-first scientific publication format, based on the affordances and strength of digital media on one hand, and on the needs and ideas of scientific writers. previous attempts to do this should be documented. also, a renderer for LaTeX (or similar) should be implemented that translates written work into this new format.
the goal of this bachelor or master thesis for one or more students is to explore the field of distributed microphones.
as the pandemic has shown, picking up audio from a room full of people (eg. for hybrid meetings) is quite a challenge. room microphones only work properly in rooms that have good audio in the first place (eg. no reverb) which often cannot be guaranteed. a promising approach to solve this problem is to use the many network-connected devices already present in a room full of people in order to create a singular audio-stream (for transmission and/or recording) that could potentially be of much higher quality than any other solution.
one or more prototypes of such a solution should be implemented and tested, based on different approaches of control (automatic control vs. user-control, push-to-talk vs. »throw the ball«, etc).
»teaspoon languages« are a new concept to embed computational thinking into various of school subjects. a teaspoon language is a very constrained programming language (in the broadest sense) that can be learned within 10 or 15 minutes. it facilitates experimentation in a topic in a specific domain. by using a teaspoon languages, students (or pupils) can learn something interesting about the domain by applying aspects of computational thinking such as iterative improvement.
the task in this master thesis is to explore the topic of teaspoon languages together with school teachers and/or pedagogy students. possible goals for this thesis include a framework for future work in this area, successful experiments (design, prototyp, evaluation) with teaspoon languages, or the design of a teaspoon language authoring environment.
AnachB.vor.at is a great ressource to plan a trip through the city of vienna. unfortunately, it is lacking in some aspects for people with special needs. for example, someone with an anxiety disorder might need a list of toilets available along the way, as toilets are a welcoming place to retreat in case you need a short break. blind people might need a catalog of audible »landmarks« to find their way; elderly might need an app that tell them the way without the need to interact with an overly complcated app.. ideally, such an app should be able to describe the way from A to B for all groups, for people with all kinds of typical or special needs.
this bachelor- or masterthesis should take the first steps in the creation of such an app. this starts with the collection of the needs of all kinds of people - i will provide the necessary contacts; the exploration of possible designs; the creation of prototypes (paper, wireframe, vertical, etc.) on various levels; the identification of the proper technology (web? mobile app? tablet app? public screen?); the implementation of a first prototype – how far this project gets will depend on the type of work (bachelor, master) and number of people are involved.
for this master thesis for one or two candidates we – prof. fares kayali and me – are looking for someone who wants to explore the crossover between a virtual lab in gather.town and a real lab at the center for teacher education at uni wien. an example for such a crossover would be an electronic whiteboard that is shared between the real space and the gather.town lab. the thesis comprises of user research, design and implementation of a prototype, and evaluation.
the goal of this master thesis project for one or two students is to create an AR app that replaces all branding in (predominantly) orban space with other content. one replacement could be the color yellow, in the spirit of the art project »Delete!«; another replacement could be the name of the company that owns that brand, eg. replacing Billa, Merkur, Penny, and ITS Reisen with ReWe Group. More ideas are welcome. The project comprises of the design and implementation of a mobile phone app for iOS (optionally also Android), the market research brand signs to replace, and the dissemination of the app as an art project.
