The State of NRW Funds Two Innovative Research Projects With 2.2 Million Euros
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As of November, the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia will be funding two new research projects at TU Dortmund University with approximately 2.2 million euros. The two selected projects were able to set themselves apart from the 69 submitted draft proposals. With the new “Profile Building” funding program, the state wants to help universities establish new research profiles and networks, and further develop existing research focuses.
The FAIR project is based exclusively at TU Dortmund University. It is set to receive around two million euros in funding over three years. An interdisciplinary research team will develop data science methods for social research to help overcome societal challenges in areas such as education, health and inclusion. The B3D project is a nationwide joint project that brings together artificial intelligence and astronomy. TU Dortmund University is one of eight partners in this collaboration, with the TU team leading the data science division and receiving around 200,000 euros in funding over three years.
FAIR: Innovative methods for social research
The FAIR interdisciplinary project intensifies the collaboration between the social sciences, statistics, and data sciences at TU Dortmund University. This is an important bridge to build because increasingly large and complex data sets – for instance, from longitudinal studies in empirical educational research and life history data from sociological gerontology – can allow for sophisticated forecasts and a deeper understanding of correlations. However, the decision on which support components are most promising at the individual level for schoolchildren, for example, has to be based on a small number of cases. Successful measures must therefore take into account large quantities of data and small numbers of cases. This is where FAIR comes in. The name stands for From prediction to Agile InteRventions in the social sciences.
“We will work as a team to make innovative data analysis methods usable for empirical social research,” says TU statistician Professor Philipp Doebler, who leads the project alongside the educational researcher Professor Fani Lauermann. The entire team is made up of TU scientists from the fields of statistics, data sciences, educational research, rehabilitation sciences and social sciences. On the one hand, they will be transferring established data science and statistical methods that are already successfully used in other contexts such as engineering to the social sciences. On the other, completely new methods have to be developed for certain studies. With the help of machine learning, sophisticated forecast models are also set to be established for empirical educational, rehabilitation and social research, among other things.
B3D: Artificial intelligence for astronomy
A joint project is being launched in North Rhine-Westphalia at the intersection between astronomy and data science, in which physicists from TU Dortmund University are heavily involved. Radio telescopes collect ever-increasing volumes of data in the search for far-off galaxies and black holes. Analyzing this influx of data is set to become even more efficient in the future with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning. To achieve this, eight institutions in North Rhine-Westphalia joined forces, under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, to form the NRW cluster for data-intensive radio astronomy: Big Bang to Big Data.
The team of academics from TU Dortmund University supporting the two physicists Professor Wolfgang Rhode and Dr. Dominik Elsässer will be leading the data science division of the project. “At TU Dortmund University, we are already in a fortunate position, as the academics conducting foundational research in physics and the computer scientists have been collaborating for many years,” says Dr. Dominik Elsässer. “The NRW joint project B3D is also relies on established structures and connects experts across the country, thus helping strengthen this pioneering research field in NRW.”