Past Events

10 years of Dortmund IRC and 5 years of DAAD EuroPIM

International research and teaching exchange with Europe, Asia and Latin America
The University of Applied Sciences and Arts welcomed to the international research and teaching exchange at the 10th Dortmund International Research Conference (Dortmund IRC) from 28-29 June 2019 and the Dortmund International Summer School from 1-5 July 2019.

Master and PhD students and lecturers had the opportunity to present and discuss their current research work and projects in the plenum. The concept, which also offers young researchers a platform where they can test themselves in scientific discourse, forms a special feature in this area. The annual conference offers an international framework. Guests from the partner universities in Bilbao, Kaunas, Leuven and Trondheim as well as from other countries were participating again this year.

"I was particularly pleased to welcome to our Round Table participants who have been at the IRC since its inception," said Clara Decelis Grewe, who, together with Prof. Dr. Carsten Wolff, Thorsten Ruben and Pedro Crovetto, was preparing both events. "Prof. Rao Aamir Ali Khan started as a master student in the EuroMPM program and now lectures in Pakistan at Comsats University in Islamabad. He, together with colleagues from Dortmund and Bilbao, had a lot to present on the development of these events and their community. Our conclusion: We will continue to focus on project management and digital transformation, and will further advance and strengthen the network internationally”. Lectures from Mexico and Chile also joined this year and were involved in lectures and teaching modules both at the Dortmund IRC and at the International Summer School. The two-day conference offered sessions on Project Management, Leadership and Sustainability, Digital Transformation, and ICT.

Dortmund International Summer School

The Dortmund IRC was followed by the Dortmund International Summer School and the PhD Summer School (1-5 July 2019), which were organized in Dortmund under the direction of the DAAD EuroPIM project, which has now been active for five years, in cooperation with the FH Dortmund, the Ruhr Master School and international partners. Students worked on research topics in the following streams: Automotive Software Engineering, Digital Marketing, Digital Systems, Quality and Sustainability in Project Management. In the PhD Summer School the PhD students dedicated themselves to the area of Research Methods and Tools.

Information on DAAD EuroPIM at www.go-study-europe.de

Contact:

Clara Decelis Grewe
Project Coordinator DAAD EuroPIM

phone: 0231 9112-8112

E-mail: clara.decelisgrewe@fh-dortmund.de

NTNU Trondheim, Norway

“I also would like to mention my experience the first week with my flat mates; I was sharing my flat with 3 girls from China- I got my room through NTNU. The culture difference between Latin culture and Chinese is extremely big. At the beginning, it was a bit hard because of the language barrier, food style, behaviors, etc. Nonetheless, day by day everything was getting better and I had a good relation with all of them. It was the first time that I was living with a culture completely different from mine and it was a good opportunity to know more about Chinese Culture and the way they are. I have to admit the only thing I couldn’t do is eat noodles during my breakfast.”

- Katia Jiménez Agurto, EuroMPM student

KU Leuven, Belgium

“The City of Leuven was really nice for me. […] The most interesting thing for me was that all people speak English and there was no need to speak in Dutch nor even French. People there were so kind to me, including the professors and students. The idea of being around people who have different mindsets, various aspirations and goals is something that I have always found intriguing.”

- Ahmed Mohamed, EuroMPM student

NTNU Trondheim, Norway

“There were two important aspects that contributed to my positive evaluation of my studies at NTNU. First, the PROMAN organization. PROMAN is the student association for the Project Management master. The association organized several activities that helped new students to be integrated. The organization managed to bring close together first year and second year master students. The events organized were mostly social events, but they also invited company representatives to present their organization and possible career opportunities for PROMAN students. […] The second aspect that had high impact on me, was the high connection between NTNU and companies. Several career fairs were organized. One that I also attended made it possible for me to find a company that was interested in the topic of my master thesis and offered to provide help with it.”

- Katalin Szász, EuroMPM student

University of the Basque Country, Spain

“All in all, the semester abroad brought me many valuable experience. The City of Bilbao and the Basque Country are very unique with their interesting and friendly environment and people. It is a highly developed region with a rich history and has had a big influence on me. It gave me an insight into how a region can, with the help of its own people, develop into one of the best regions in Europe in terms of education and industry.”

- Misagh Rostami, EuroMPM student

Dortmund Summer School 2018

Everyone should know how to increase their reach in the internet and social media. Following this idea, one of the final presentations of the Dortmund International Summer School stressed out: „Digital Marketing is for everyone.“ Over more than 100 students from Europe and an international team of lecturers gathered in different streams and in a PhD Summer School to tackle all sorts of exciting topics, real case studies and challenges within the areas of Engineering, Digital Transformation, and Project Management. „We need more knowledge sharing between the European countries“, concluded Saad Ahmad from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. While attending the Dortmund International Summer School 2017 as a PhD, he now joined as a lecturer, giving advice to other PhDs on how to conduct their research.

Prorector Andrea Kienle during the Opening Session.

Inspired by the research projects presented during the Dortmund International Research Conference 2018, students from Dortmund, Belgium, Lithuania, Norway, Spain, Ukraine, amongst other countries, gathered for one week in interdisciplinary teams to work on tasks given by lecturers and companies.
One of those companies was Ambient Innovation: GmbH, represented by Ronny Vedrilla who gave a talk on Scrum at the beginning of the General Project Management stream and explained how it was implemented and is being used within the company. The stream participants subsequently learned over the week different tools and methods to manage not only projects within the digital domain, but also those of high complexity and innovation.

Participants and lecturers of the General Project Management stream.

„The innovation comes when people from different disciplines work together“, was the compliment of one of the participants of the Summer School. And this is exactly what the Dortmund International Summer School is aiming for: Not only to provide the platform for people to meet, but to connect different scientific approaches, methods and perspectives. The streams offered were on Automotive Software Engineering, Data Analytics Hackathon with IBM Watson, Digital Marketing, Sustainability in Project Management and Usability Engineering. „The social life during the summer school is most important“, added Josu Garai, student from UPV/EHU Bilbao, Spain. And they had a lot of social interactions, especially the participants of the Usability Engineering stream, who developed a mobile app and tested it directly with people in the pedestrian area in downtown Dortmund.

Participants and lecturers oft he PhD Summer School.

As professor Beverly Pasian from Utrecht University of applied Sciences and one of the lecturers of the PhD Summer School emphasizes that „the sharing of knowledge is most important“, a publication of the contributions to the PhD Summer School and of selected works by Master students is planned in a special issue of the journal “Project Management – Research and Practice”.

For more information on the annual Dortmund International Summer School, please contact us via [europim@fh-dortmund.de].
For more information on the annual PhD Summer School and other PhD related events, please contact Ala Nuseibah via [ala.nuseibah@fh-dortmund.de].

International Week/ International Days 2018
“International = Digital?” – The International Days 2018

Like in previous years, students, lecturers, and academic staff from FH Dortmund took part in the International Days (12th-16th March, 2018) at the KU Leuven Technology Campus De Nayer in Belgium. This event organized by KU Leuven and Thomas More University of Applied Sciences features lectures, presentations, and workshops focusing on Technology, Engineering and Entrepreneurship ( link ). Following this year’s theme “International = Digital?” topics like trends in the mobile radio technology, big data, AI and autonomous robots, augmented reality, as well as new technologies for the automobile industry were presented. Speakers from countries like Belgium, China, Germany, Greece, Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Turkey, the UK, Ukraine, and the United States took part in this event. For the students from FH Dortmund, besides the lectures, a special workshop programme was organized.

For the students, the week started with the lecture “State-of-the-Art Computer Vision and Image Interpretation Techniques to be used in a Mechatronic System”, combined with a practical exercise with Raspberry Pi on face recognition. On Tuesday, they participated in the lecture “Introduction to VHDL & Combinatorial Circuits on an FPGA” and in the practical exercise “Sequential Circuits & System on Chip Design on an FPGA“. On Wednesday they visited the lecture “Motor Management and Chip Tuning”, which included a guided tour through the Test Center for Automotive Technology.

On Thursday, the lectures “Natural Language Processing – NLP – Speech and Text Analytics”, and “Avatars Virtual Agent & Bots“ took place, the latter examining the creation and working process of AIs. Also, the students were able to gain first knowledge on programming in Python during the course “Python on Raspberry Pi”. On Friday, the event concluded with a presentation of the Product Certification Center (PCC) and an introduction into the field of Electromagnetic Compatibility.

KU Leuven not only created a broad academic programme, but also offered a wide variety of social events. On Sunday, students from FH Dortmund were welcomed by Peter Arras, professor at KU Leuven, and were guided through downtown Mechelen were they could enjoy its unique cultural atmosphere. On Monday, they were invited by students from KU Leuven, Campus De Nayer, to join their Cantus, a typical Belgian student evening. For the lecturers and academic staff, different guided city walks through Lier and large networking events were offered.

The International Days at the Technology Campus De Nayer offered students the opportunity to visit lectures by experts from all over the world and to get into contact with different concepts of teaching, enabling them to see their own academic as well as professional development from a different angle. Some were even encouraged to study for a semester abroad at KU Leuven.

Conference Research and Education in Project Management - REPM

FH Dortmund und EuroPIM visiting the first REPM Conference of UPV/ EHU Bilbao

The REPM Conference (Research and Education in Project Management Conference), organized by the UPV/ EHU University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, took place for the first time on 22nd-23rd March, 2018. ( link ) Its goal: To bring together people from the field of Project Management (PM), practitioners and academics, to discuss recent developments in Research and Education and the implementation of PM in the different fields of work, as well as to bring into focus possible approaches to the way of teaching PM. For this, postgraduate students, lecturers and practitioners met for a dialogue at eye level, while one entire session was dedicated to the talks by members of the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts (FH Dortmund). After presentations on the application of PM in the field of work as well as on educational models at universities, a final panel discussion between practitioners and academics took place. Although the participants agreed that PM cannot be exclusively learned at a company or a university, the suggestions for didactical and practical approaches differed on various levels. Nevertheless, the broad agreement was that practice and theory need to be coordinated in a better way, in order to achieve a standard within the didactics of PM which complies the requirements of companies and universities, likewise. This goal is already being targeted at FH Dortmund, especially by the EuroMPM, as well as by the DAAD funded project EuroPIM (European Partnership for Project and Innovation Management). The idea is to permanently establish an International Master School for PM. The involved EuroPIM partners are UPV/EHU Bilbao (Spain), KTU Kaunas (Lithuania), KU Leuven (Belgium) and NTNU Trondheim (Norway).
The second day of the conference was mainly dedicated to a series of workshops targeting topics like Certification of Competences of the Project Manager, Software for PM, Writing Research Papers on PM, as well as Didactical Concepts for Teaching PM at Schools. The conference concluded with a presentation on the construction project of the Football Stadium San Mamés in Bilbao, which was completed in 2013. While being in the Basque Country, Clara Decelis Grewe (Project Coordinator DAAD EuroPIM), Christian Reimann (Informatics Department), Thorsten Ruben (Coordinator Embedded Systems for Mechatronics and Ruhr Master School), Rolf Schuster (Informatics Department) und Carsten Wolff (IDiAL Institute) visited the UPV/ EHU Campus in San Sebastian to discuss further cooperation formats for joint Block Weeks, Summer Schools and exchange programmes for students from Bilbao, San Sebastian and Dortmund. Main point of interest was the new Master Digital Transformation, which will start at FH Dortmund in the upcoming Winter Term 2018/19.
The proceedings of the REPM 2018 are now available here !

International Days at KU Leuven

The University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund was invited to attend a two-day workshop followed by an International Week in KU Leuven, the International Days 2017 at Technology Campus De Nayer, from the 13th till the 17th of March 2017. Students from Master Embedded Systems for Mechatronics, European Master in Project Management and the Master in Computer Science Programs (22 in total) participated in this event.
On the first day of the two-day workshop, March 13th, the students attended a workshop given by Prof. Dirk Van Merode, which included Advanced PCB design, VHDL-FPGA and the tools from Xilinx, and ARM Cortex M7 on STM Discovery. The students were given a tour on Campus and its laboratories, and were introduced to the different research projects currently held there. Afterwards, they were invited to attend a cultural event, a so-called cantus, which is typical for Belgium and was organized by the KU Leuven student fraternities. The Cantus mainly involves singing and drinking beer; the songs are from a book called the Codex, which contains anthems, and hundreds of songs in different languages, such as Dutch, French, German, etc. This experience was new to our international students and was very well accepted and enjoyed. On Tuesday, March 14th, Prof. Toon Goedemé gave a workshop in Face Detection and Object Tracking, which was later followed by a practical session in face detection using the Raspberry pi. In the evening, a guided tour through Mechelen was given by Prof. Peter Arras, which the students very much enjoyed.

On Wednesday, the International Days started. Speakers with expertise in different areas, technological and non-technological, like communication skills and innovation came from different parts of the world, like Portugal, Ukraine, United Kingdom. On this day, new trends in automotive industry were introduced, in addition to presenting the role of technology in the international leasing business. Followed by another lecture on the Revolutions in Artificial Intelligence. In the afternoon session, a lecture was given on Motor Management and Calibration, followed by a tour at the De Nayer Campus Test Center for Automotive Technology (ATC), where some tests were performed as a demonstration for the students.
Thursday started with a morning session on Python using Raspberry Pi. In the afternoon, sessions on Deep Learning and Deep Learning with Object Detection took place. Afterwards, the students were offered a guided tour in the Laboratoria De Nayer located on the Product Certification Center (PCC), where a wide range of multidisciplinary testing services are carried out, like Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC), mechanical tests (vibration, shock,…), among others.
On Friday, a session on the problems and methods of technical and biomedical diagnosis was given, followed by a session on the potentials of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the opportunities and challenges that it poses. Afterwards, it was shown how to develop IoT applications based on the Raspberry Pi platform. Later that afternoon, students attended sessions in intercultural communication and innovation.
These sessions attended by the students of FH Dortmund belonged to a much broader offer of sessions at the International Week. This opportunity has given the students the chance to meet other students, researchers, and entrepreneurs with different expertise and to share their experiences and knowledge.

Student Exchange Winter Term 2016/2017 Experiences

Leuven was the perfect Study Abroad City

“In conclusion, I can say that the study abroad in Leuven was beyond my expectations. Even though, I had to deal with some problems related to accommodation, language and project, I believe that they all made me stronger and helped me to improve my skills while trying to find a solution. On the other hand, I had the chance to study in one of the best universities in Europe. Moreover, I led an engineering project within an international team consisting of diverse study backgrounds. Besides, I made a network from all around the world by meeting with new people not only from university, but also from companies by contacting possible sponsors for the project [I worked on]. Last but not least, I enjoyed my time with friends by going [on] trips, participating in university events and student organizations. Leuven was the perfect study abroad city by means of high percentage of the students in the city, weekly student events & parties and welcoming the international students.”
– Ilayda Ündar, EuroMPM student

Ecorace Challenge. (Courtesy of Ilayda Ündar)

Chance to meet and understand local Norwegians

“It took me not so long to integrate with Norwegian students as they were quite good in English- so there was not really a language barrier for non-Norwegian speaker! I participated in lot of student extracurricular activities organized by our department and program- PROMAN, European Students Networks which includes cabin trip, pub crawl parties, Jule board, Buddy Program meetings, etc. I also joined one of the largest global youth organization AIESEC, Trondheim chapter and participated in a 3-day annual conference at Bergen, Norway. Through these activities I got immense chance to meet and understand local Norwegians and tried to learn their culture and way of treating life in general.
On other side I was focused and determined to write a good quality specialization research project along with the right mix of specialization courses. The teaching method was quite interesting, as all classes were divided into different components from regular seminars to group assignment and guest speaker sessions.”
– Temoor Khan Khoso, EuroMPM student

I felt myself well-equiped for the Master Thesis and Business Life.

“Before going to Bilbao for a semester, I had some worries because I am already an international student and I got used to live and study in Germany. However, Bilbao was a different experience for my life since the culture and people’s perspective are entirely different. I could experience different lives through this project and it helped me decide in which culture I can work much better. […] I will be always open to work in different projects with the participation of people coming from different cultures. I really liked this experience and I feel myself well-equipped for the master thesis and business life.”
– Özgür Yasar, EuroMPM student

Northern Lights (Courtesy of Martin Brehmer)

I honestly did not expect such an individual support

“At first, the personal attachment to the supervisor surprised me. With such a large and prestigious university (Nobel prize 2014 in medicine) I honestly did not expect such an individual support. Especially since such a connection between professor and student in Germany is not usual. Especially the address of a professor in Norway is unusual for German conditions. Thus professors are addressed there with their first name. After my professor had drawn my attention to the upcoming conference PROFES2016, where he was one of the organizers, I placed myself as a volunteer. The volunteer team included some of his students as well as researchers from other countries. This resulted in a multicultural team responsible for the organization of the conference. Organizing the check-in of the researchers, greeting and participating in the get-together was part of the tasks. Through the participation I had the opportunity to talk with the authors of the paper and to listen to specialist lectures. The framework program has given me many insights into the scientific work, as well as the Norwegian life.”
– Kevin Schie, Computer Science student