Digitalisation plays a key role in the University's research and teaching. The Digitalisation Hub was created to bundle and promote the diverse activities in this area across faculty boundaries.
The Digitalisation Hub serves as a central platform where academics from different disciplines can present and discuss their research on digitalisation. This is where experts in computer science, business, economics, law, humanities, cultural studies and social sciences come together to leverage interdisciplinary synergies. The Digitalisation Hub also holds regular research forums, where current projects and findings are presented and discussed. These interdisciplinary exchange formats provide researchers with valuable impetus for their work and help to further strengthen collaborative research at the University of Passau.
The research topics covered by the Digitalisation Hub are wide-ranging and include technical aspects such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and robotics as well as economic and legal questions and those concerning the impact of digitalisation on society, culture and the environment. Academics at the Passau Institute of Digital Security (PIDS) carry out research on innovative solutions in the areas of data protection and IT security, while researchers at the Faculty of Law examine legal questions opened up by the digital transformation. Digitalisation also plays an important role in the humanities and social sciences. In the field of “eHumanities”, academics investigate how digitalisation affects research and teaching in these disciplines. Moreover, academics at the University of Passau are researching the use of generative language models, which open up new possibilities for processing and generating natural language. These technologies are applied across a large number of fields, such as text analysis, translation and dialogue systems. The research forum of the Digitalisation Hub offers academics an interdisciplinary exchange platform on current research topics in digitalisation.
In addition to pure research, the Digitalisation Hub also serves as an interface between university and practice. Here, companies and other stakeholders in the region can get in touch with the academics and benefit from their expertise. For example, the Digitalisation Hub organises workshops and other events, in which the latest developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, the Metaverse or sustainability through digitalisation are presented and debated. This is one of the ways in which the University fosters knowledge transfer between the University and society. In all, the Digitalisation Hub is a key facilitator for interdisciplinary digitalisation research at the University of Passau. It connects academics from different disciplines, stimulates interdisciplinary exchange and generates an important impetus for the economy and society.
Professor Harald Kosch, Vice President for Academic Infrastructure and IT, is the director of the Digitalisation Hub. He sets out the strategic orientation and objectives for advancing the University's digital transformation.
The day-to-day operations are overseen by a general manager, whose responsibilities include the smooth implementation of projects and the bundling of the diverse activities related to digitalisation. In close coordination with the vice president, the general manager ensures that the expertise and competences of the various research units and institutions work together optimally.
The vice president and general manager together form the Digitalisation Hub's senior management. They are committed to driving forward the digital transformation of the University of Passau and creating the preconditions for innovative, forward-looking solutions.
