We are fortunate to have a wide range of expertise and experience on the iRead project team. In a series of blog posts we will introduce each of our partners and find out what motivated them to get involved in the iRead project. Next up is DHBW Karlsruhe (introduced by Professor of Informatics, Kay Berkling).
Introducing Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg (DHBW) Cooperative State University Karlsruhe
The Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Karlsruhe/Baden-Württemberg (DHBW) Cooperative State University Karlsruhe offers career-integrated undergraduate and Master study programs. The dual education concept in which employers and state-run professional educational schools cooperate has a long tradition in Germany.
The Computer Science Department in Karlsruhe is one of the largest departments at our University. Students studying in this discipline are exposed to software engineering practice at work and at the University. Over the past few years, research and publications have started to include Bachelor students’ work in their third year because they are able to engineer real systems that work in the real world.
Professor Kay Berkling | Full Professor in Informatics
I joined the faculty of DHBW-Karlsruhe as Full Professor in Informatics in 2008. My expertise lies in working across disciplines to create real-world applications. I have worked at KIT, TIT, MIT, and Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. My research originated in the area of automatic Language Identification and Dialect Identification in speech. Over the past decade the main area has become games and gamification with respect to education. Using speech technology, I designed a system for automatically classifying orthographic mistakes in children’s writing, enabling a more profound and corpus-based study of L1 acquisition.
I have also established on of the first corpora collections that are public and available through the Linguistic Data Consortium, thereby enabling researchers to work on a large data and more importantly on a common data set for comparative studies. I have degrees in teaching and languages as well as Engineering and Mathematics which gives me a broad perspective on her field of study. I have designed a game for orthography acquisition that has shown to be highly addictive to children and made a positive difference in standardized testing results (VERA-3) for those classrooms that participated in our studies.
For outstanding design in gamification for education, I also received the NEO award for the Technology Region Karlsruhe in 2016.
Why did I get involved in iRead?
I joined iRead on the recommendation of a network for like-minded researchers called INDUS (technologies for individualized language learning). The topic of this project lies at the intersection of my expertise, software engineering, linguistics, games, learning and language. I am excited about contributing to the project and seeing the games deployed in schools in Germany.
iread-project.eu 