Double success at Prix Ars Electronica

1727878051 / AE541002

2024 edition of Prix Ars Electronica was quite a success. Not only was the proposal Narrative Futures: Panchatantra Fables meet Personal Primer awarded nomination in Science+Technology+Arts (S+T+Arts) category, additionally to that, Design & Computation students Pietro Lugaro and Alessandro Mac-Nelly have been awarded Grand Prize of the Ars-Electronica Campus Award 2024.

Participants of 0th Berlin Symposium on Reading Acquistion in Epoch of Artificial Intelligence vote that AIs should be used as educational assistants of human teachers, but not autonomous stand-alones

1719234976 / AE540624

At a final vote concluding the 0th 0th Berlin Symposium on Reading Acquistion in Epoch of Artificial Intelligence. two dozens of professionals from diverse fields have been asked two questions. The overall score for the first one: "Should AIs be used to teach children learn how to read in autonomous manner ?" has been -0.46 (-1 meaning "rather not", -2 meaning "definitely not"). The second question "Should AIs be used as assistant to human teachers teaching kids how to read ?" had been attributed the overall score was "1.266.." (1 meaning "rather yes", 2 meaning "definitely yes").


Symposium overview here: https://baumhaus.digital/1445

Invitation to join 0th Berlin Symposium on Reading Acquistion in Epoch of Artificial Intelligence

1712137588 / AE540403

Dear colleague, we hereby cordially invite You to register to the event "0. Berliner Symposium über Leseförderung im Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligenz" which will take place on 22.5.2024 at Einstein Center Digital Future. You will find more information at the website lesen.digital.

Personal Primer submitted to Prix Ars Electronica

1710946179 / AE540320

The proposal "Narrative futures: Panchatantra Fables in the Personal Primer" has just been submitted to science+technology+arts (S+T+ARTS) category of Prix Ars Electronica. 

First UDK.AI LLMs and datasets on Huggingface

1706526403 / AE540129

7-billion (7B) parameter open-source large language models Garrulus and Turdus have been recently released on udk.ai's Hugginface repository.

Based on Mistral-7B model and optimized by "Direct Preference Optimization" technique, Garrulus was the first 7B model in the history which surpassed 75% accuracy of ARC, MMLU, Hellawag, GSM8K, Truthtful_QA and Winogrande evaluation metrics. A less contaminated Turdus model provides the base for state-of-the-art research in the field of LLM and has been already downloaded almost 2000 times.

Additionally the udk.ai Hugginface organization which is closely affiliated to @DigiEduBerlin also contains the dataset "Kinderlexikon for Direct Prefernce Optimization" which can be immediately used to transform LLM like Turdus into LLM providing responses in simplified German language. Example of such model answering a question "What is categorical imperative ?" here.

Talk about past, present and future of AI at Freie Universität

1701440117 / AE531201

Presentation which accompanied my talk "Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der künstlichen Intelligenz" which introduced some basic AI concepts to almost hundred Law students of Berlin's Freie Universität is accessible at baumhaus.digital/KI.

Final report for teacher.solar project online

1701439836 / AE531201

A 23-page long closing report for the project "Teacher.solar :: open source/hardware toolbox for CO2-neutral outdoor digital education" is available on Stifterverband website. Here is the english version and here is the german one. Enjoy !

Human-Machine Peer Learning and Personal Primer presented at OEB2023

1701430166 / AE531201

It was a honor and pleasure to present the concept of Human-Machine Peer Learning (HMPL) to participant of this year's Online Educa Berlin boardroom dialogue:  "HMPL: What and Why?". Presentation which launched the dialogue is available at baumhaus.digital/HMPL *.

Subsequently, 4 prototypes issued out of the Personal Primer project were presented in the "How To" session Make Your Own Digital Primer.

Impulse talk "Green Illusions & Solarpunk dreams: Future of digital sustainability"

1697186821 / AE531013

Presentation which accompanied the impulse-talk  "Green Illusions & Solarpunk dreams: Future of digital sustainability" at Weizenbaum Institute is available here: https://baumhaus.digital/973 *

Keywords: digital sustainability, quaternio terminorum, GPU-rich, GPU-poor, digital opulence, digital ascesis, size-coding, perma-computing, solarpunk, eco-artificial education

* correct display of baumhaus.digital foliae is guaranteed only on desktop viewports

Personal Primer code on GitHub

1697185714 / AE531013

Refactored, highly configurable and parametrizable asyncio-compliant code for first generation of Personal Primer artefacts is from now on available here https://github.com/hromi/personal_Primer. Thanks to GPT4 for useful assistance in creation of pure and sustainable code.

fibel.digital gaining visibility

1695130610 / AE530919

The Progressive Web App (PWA) version of the digital Primer accessible at the address fibel.digital is gradually getting some important traction. Most importantly  all major search engines (e.g. Google, Bing Duckduckgo) put the PWA at highest position (rank #1) for search query "digitale Fibel" . For other queries like "Silbenketten, deutsche Fibel, deutsche Zungerbrecher or deutsche Alphabet, fibel.digital is slowly but steadily and firmly establishing in top 10 ranking positions. And we haven't even started yet ;)

Contribution to Archaeoriddle #0

1693817332 / AE530904

I had huge please in participating at 0th Archaeo-riddle, as organized by Computational and Digital Archaeology Laboratory of Cambridge University. The naive / lazy / narrative method I used is more closely described in the presentation which was presented at Archaeo-riddle workshop at annual conference of European Association of Archeologists, the presentation is accessible here: https://baumhaus.digital/911.

Final intuition behind the solution can be summarized by a conjecture: "Let's have two cultures A and B initially established in regions R_A and R_B separated by a geographical barreer. Let's have culture A which gains the ability to cross or bypass the barreer thus entering the region R_B and getting into contact with B. Under condition that all other parameters are more or less equal (e.g. enviromental fitness in both regions), a significantly shorter settlement persistence of distribution of settlements of culture A in R_B, as compared with A's settlement persistence distribution assessed in other regions, implies hostile relation between A and B."

Invitation to Make Your Own Embooked Speech-Based Educational Artifact at INTERSPEECH 2023

1693395889 / AE530830

The Personal Primer project has been presented at INTERSPEECH 2023 conference in 'Show and Tell' Section on 24th Aug, 13:30-15:30.
As an art+technology convergence project presented in the most renowned scientific conference in the field of 'Speech', the project has been received impressive feedbacks from engineers and scientists.
During the presentation, participants have gotten to know, how the project has been developed in past years and a little bit of knowledge how to make your own phyisical artifact. 

You can watch the presentation video (with subtitle) here / For the poster of the presentation (A1 size), you can download from here

Fulltext of article "Digital Primer Implementation of Human-Machine Peer Learning for Reading Acquisition" under open access

1693172193 / AE530827 , https://doi.org/10.54941/ahfe1004027

Fulltext of the article "Digital Primer Implementation of Human-Machine Peer Learning for Reading Acquisition: Introducing Curriculum 2" which has just been presented at conference on Human Interaction & Emerging Technologies (IHIET 2023) is available under open access here.

Baumhaus folios which were presented at Nice are accessible here: Presentation of article Digital Primer Implementation of Human-Machine Peer Learning for Reading Acquisition: Introducing Curriculum 2.

The Art of the Curve & Young Hacker's Illustrated Primer at Chaos Communication Camp 2023

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Every four years, Chaos Communication Club (CCC) organizes their Chaos Communication Camp (CCC), one of the best hack & fnord art events of the planet. And DigiEduBerlin were lucky enough to be there with multiple interventions: thus, three iterations of the Elliptic Curve Initiation workshop "Kunst der Kurven"   * took place at Creative Coding Zone (Ziegeleipark Mildenberg's Trockenschuppen area: (greetings to Pixtur; byte observer, cables.gl, zden & Mona) and one iteration of Young Hacker's Illustrated Primer took place in collaboration with Jugend Hackt  and Verstehbahnhof (greetings to dnb, Meister Techniker, Lisa, Katja, Nils & co.). Beautiful event with beautiful people.

Plethora of art pieces presented at UdK's Rundgang 2023

1690458728 / AE530727

Almost twenty  different pieces of unique art issued out of classes "Making of a (digital) education artefact" and "Bildung Biodigitale: Animals" were presented in Room 311 of Medienhhaus / Grunewaldstrasse building of Berlin University of the arts. These include:

• video pieces "Arancini" (Yujin Song), "Loud Sea" (Alina Abberger), "Mami Wata" (Raviva Nsiama)
• performance elements / props "I dwell like a pigeon" (Janine Aschenbrenner)
• video installation "Magic Hour" (Ran Ren)
• fine-art illustration series on topic of Panchatantra's Book 1 (Taro Usami)
• new media / artificial animal installation "American Pika" (Ying Chen)
• ceremonial space / artificial animal network "Bird more while You are living for You'll be a long time dead" (Daniel Devatman Hromada), death mask by Slavomir Gibej
• bio-artificial coccoon "Reminiscence" (Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya)
• three Personal Primer prototypes (Daniel D. Hromada & Hyungjoong Kim)
• sonic installation "ID de Valladolid macht Woof" (Julius Friedrich Riek)
• graphic design setup "Watch up for Redback Spider" (Gaito Suzuki)
• poster "Yoga and Animals" (Larissa Martins Gerich)
• take-home installation "Revenge of the orcas" (Moana Schorlemer Filipe)
• narrative series "Where the weird things are" (En Kitani & Steffi Balint-Gruber)
• synthesizer / theremin setup "The Sun is its mother, the Moon is its mother, the Wind has carried it in its belly, its nourse is the Earth" (Muyang Lyu)
  
  

Aside this, the air in the room was enriched by oxygen produced by a full aquarium of chlorella vulgaris, embellished with replica of installation "Save a dying bird" (Jung Hsu) and completed with a desktop allowing visitors to communicate with udk.ai first large language models.

Two proposals accepted for Chaos Communication Camp 2023

1689600179 / AE530717

Two proposals originating from DigiEduBerlin has been accepted to coolest hacker camp of the EU, and thus also of this planet (= Chaos Computer Club' Chaos Communication Camp). During workshop labeled Young Hacker's Illustrated Primer which will be realized within the context of CCC's Jugend hackt initiative, young generation of geeks & nerds will learn how to build & code & tune their own copy of the Personal Primer. Additionally, the artistic intervention Kunst der Kurven will initiate the uninitiated into the symmetric-asymmetric beauty underlying fundamental algebraic structures which provide the basis for modern basis of modern asymmetric cryptography: elliptic curves.

Code for UDK.AI bot now on Github

1686478249 / AE530611

Python code for bot bridging matrix rooms with Your own instance of automatic1111 stable diffusion text-to-image generating API. The name "Karel" was given to the project in order to honor work of Czech author "Karel Čapek" who in his theatre play "Rossum's Universal Robots" coined the word "robot".

Here is the project:https://github.com/hromi/karel feel free to fork & develop it further.

Some outputs generated by Karel can be seen at https://udk.ai

palope.digital domain activated

1684923330 / AE530524

Some open educational resources (OER)s which were until now available only through fibel.digital now move to their own domain palope.digital . Currently, it's only a set of audiotext folios introducting all personages of the Zirkus Palope family recorded in two voices ("female german" 🇩🇪♀ and "male german" 🇩🇪♂️) but soon new exercises (e.g. "memory game" 🎴) and OERs will be added.

"Digital Primer Implementation of Human- Machine Peer Learning for Reading Acquisition" pre-print

1684853414 / AE530523 , https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.22288.17925

An article "Digital Primer Implementation of Human- Machine Peer Learning for Reading Acquisition: Introducing Curriculum 2" has been recently accepted for 10th International Conference on Human Interaction & Emerging Technologies (IHIET 2023). The article presents first results issued out of Personal Primer project. It also indicates that artificial assistants for reading acquisition can be developed whereby both the child and machine benefit from mutual interaction: child learns how to read and machine learns how to process child's speech.

Pre-print of the article is available here as well as on Researchgate under DOI 10.13140/RG.2.2.22288.17925

Personal Primer project has been accepted in INTERSPEECH 2023 Show and Tell

1684762261 / AE530522

A paper "Personal Primer Prototype 1: Invitation to Make Your Own Embooked Speech-Based Educational Artifact" and an introduction video has been accepted in INTERSPEECH 2023 The project will be displayed during the conference period (20th Aug - 24th Aug). Intespeech's double-blind peer review here.

UDK.AI bot activated

1682586511 / AE530427

Zeroth version of the bot "Karel Čapek" which interconnects the matrix room #AI-UDK:m3x.baumhaus.digital with our UdK-hosted Stable Diffusion Automatic1111 instance has been activated.

Results are available at the address udk.ai .

More to come soon. Stay tuned.

Beta version of German digital primer ( digitale Fibel ) app activated

1679435815 / AE530321

To celebrate the first spring day, beta version of the web component of the digital primer project has just been activated on-line. Seemingly naive and trivial on the first sight, the domain hide following innovations under its hood:

• German / Slovak / English / Spanish automatic speech-recognition (ASR) models which do not run in the cloud but on our own edge computing (NVIDIA Jetson) hardware
• implementation of our "Human-Machine Peer Learning"  which allows us to adapt ASR models to individual human learners
• voice-based authentication
• Kastalia KMS knowledge-graph backend allowing us to have predicated hypertext (=cybertext) and arbitrary N-M relations between primer's knowledge units
• adaptive learning system
• progressive web app support *
• multi-font, multi-speed and multi-voice features for audiotext playing
• diverse activities like read (👄) recite (🎤) play (🎴) listen (👂) test (💯) or learn (👩🏼‍💻)

and vaste amount of content spanning all levels of reading expertise from syllables all the way to texts. Feel free to probe it at https://fibel.digital or, if ever You would like to try some more advanced AI features, write us a mail at info at fibel dot digital. * You can install the fibel as an app by simply visiting the url fibel.digital and then clicking on "Install" (Android) or "Share - Add to home screen" (IOS) in the ⋮ menu of Your smartphone's browser

Article about "Human-Machine Peer Learning" published in Frontiers in Education

1676993263 / AE530221 , 10.3389/feduc.2023.1063337

First major article more closely describing the concept of "human-machine peer learning" in practical Artificial Intelligence in Education ( #AIED ) scenario has just been published in a Curriculum & Pedagogy section of peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Education.  Carrying a title "Proof-of-concept of feasibility of human–machine peer learning for German noun vocabulary acquisition", the article provides first empiric evidence of feasibility of educational scenarios where humans and machines learn with - and from - each other. 

Open access fulltext is available at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2023.1063337/full.

First DeepSpeech models of Slovak and HighSorbian languages submitted to Mozilla's "our voices" competition

1666259301 / AE521020

Core of DigiEduBerlin's submission to Mozilla's "our voices 2022 competition" is a first publicly available, light-weight (e.g. DeepSpeech) speech-to-text acoustic & language model intentionally covering both Slovak (SK) as well as Czech (CS) poles of SlovakoCzech language continuum. Here is the github repository containing acoustic and language model of slovak language. And here are resources for High Sorbian language.

Solar artefact workshop and Bildung Biodigitale talk @ Bits & Bäume

1665412554 / AE521010

It was quite a pleasure to participate at this edition of a wonderful digitalization / sustainability conference-festival Bits & Bäume. First, solar artefacts Wand 0, Harp, Display, Terminal and 2 copies of digital primer  have been presented to visitors of DigiEduBerlin's "solar soldering" workshop. Subsequently, intervention continued with the talk "Bildung Biodigitale - educational curriculum for Novacene era". Overview of both interventions can be found here.

Talk at 27th Germanistentag

1665411994 / AE521010

Presentation related to talk "Mehrdeutigkeiten und Ontogenese der Kompetenzen: Beispiele aus Spracherwerb, Leseerwerb und maschinellem Lernen" which has been presented within the panel " Sprachliche Mehrdeutigkeiten als Kippfiguren zum Entdecken von Eindeutigkeit im Gesprochenen und Geschriebenen" is available here.

Article "teacher.js: A low-bandwidth Digital Tool for Outdoor Online Teaching" now published in IEEE Proceedings

1663860189 / AE520922 , 10.1109/ECEI53102.2022.9829451

An article "teacher.js: A low-bandwidth Digital Tool for Outdoor Online Teaching" which was presented at 2022 IEEE 5th Eurasian Conference on Educational Innovation (ECEI) is now accessible on-line in IEEE's ieeexplore system. . Enjoy!

"Digital Primer" and "Speech recognition on the edge" were presented in TSD 2022 Conference

1662977787 / AE520912

On 7th of September at  25th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2022) in Brno, Czech, DigiEduBerlin team presented "Digital Primer v1 :: One Goal, Two Prototypes" as a part of Demo session and "Speech recognition on the edge" as a tutorial session. in the demo session, two sub-branches of current Digital Primer project were introduced: “physical” Personal Primer (π2) branch focuses on design of a post-smartphone open hardware artefact based on “Raspberry Pi Zero” technology, and “Web Primer” sub-project provides extended functionality in browser.
During the "Speech Recognition on the Edge" tutorial session, participants will be introduced to diverse ways how speech-to-text (STT) inferences can be realized on non-cloud, local (i.e. edge-computing) architectures. Participants will acquire knowledge and competence concerning intricacies and nuances of execution of  ASR system(DeepSpeech) on three different hardware architectures (e.g. RaspberryPiZero (armv6); RaspberryPi 4 (armv7 without CUDA) and NVIDIA Jetson Xavier (armv8 / aarch64 with CUDA). In addition, the "Voice Shell" was shortly introduced as an artistic performance.

Presentations here: https://wizzion.com/228/

Projects from the seminar "Bildung Biodigitale 1 :: Plants"

1659429325 / AE520802

• '拈華微笑 Flower Sermon by Taro Usami
  
  
  
• The Manuscript by Anastasia Almosova
  
  An AR exercise on the spatial reading of the not yet deciphered illustrated codex from the early 15th century called Voynich manuscript.
  
  
• Dear you by Zhiping Bian
  
  Dear you,
  
  If you were seeing this, I would kindly and sincerely invite you to pet this plant in front of you and this plant you see in this building.
  Please bring this invitation with you.
  If you feel pain or itching, it's normal and won't last long. You will be in a biological instinctive defence mechanism. If your pain won't dissipate, scrub with soap and you'll be fine. What you got was not an instruction, but a suggestion to you. If you want to distance yourself from the plant, that would be your choice.
  During this period I take full responsibility.
  
  Best,
  Zhiping
  
  
• fukuoka by Nick Alker
  
  Fukuoka Farming is a unique approach to natural farming that utilizes direct observations of nature. It is also referred to as „do-nothing farming“.
  The main point is to leave nature as it is and add the least possible human work to it.
  
  
• Roots by David Minh Quan Ha
  
• Plant model 001 by Maurice Wald
  
• Ceci n'est pas la nature morte
  

Some recent talks and presentations

1659368884 / AE520801

June/July 2022 (AE520[6|7]) was quite charged when it comes to diverse presentations at different occasions and venues. Thus, in this presentation, we provided to to our generous donors from Cornelsen Foundation some insights into what @DigiEduBerlin team has been recently doing; few days later, professor colleagues from Einstein Center Digital Future were updated during our ECDF July Brownbag talk and on the same day, the talk Invitation to a certain post-digital world (realized in collaboration with Maria Kyrou) concluded the symposium (Post)digitalität in der künstlerischen Lehrkräftebildung. Enjoy browsing through those folios (and maybe You'll notice that with some of those presentations, You can interact in a contact-less manner, by executing necessary hand-movements in front of Your webcam).

The artwork 'ISWISK' is presented to xCoAx 2022 Conference

1657789020 / AE520714

The artwork 'Ich Sage Was Ich Sagen Kann (ISWISK)' which had been developed from the last winter semester (2021-2022) by a scientific assistant of DigiEduBerlin Team, Hyungjoong Kim with Prof. Hromada, was presented to xCoAx 2022 10th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X which takes place in Coimbra, Portugal this year. 

The project is about multiple self-made voice bots have a dialogue with each other by using Keyword Spotting (KWS) in the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) domain. The speech recognition modules by using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model are installed on eight microcontrollers, which give utterances when certain keywords are detected.

Lightning Talk about Digitally Assisted Outdoor Teaching Presented at Stiftverband's Lehrkonferenz

1657274024 / AE520708

A lightning talk presenting main outputs of the teacher.solar project, i.e. Outdoor Online Teaching (OOT), Bildung Biodigitale Curriculum, teacher.js software for shared attention teaching, Digital Education Artefacts avocad0 & magic wand0 as well as experimental methods like solar soldering were presented to visitors of University Teacher Conference (Lehrkonferenz) which concluded 10 years of Stifterverband's program for Fellowship in High School Education.

Presentation is available here.

Additionally, 17 strophes resulting from the poeto-musical intervention "Ode to Didactics" have also been presented. But we shall get to that later ;)

Congratulations to Jung Hsu & Natalia Rivera for winning 1st prize at Ars Electronica

1655888694 / AE520622

We are happy to announce that the artefact realized by a student member of DigiEduBerlin Team, student tutor Jung Hsu (TW) had in collaboration with a co-student Natalia Rivera (CO) has won a Golden Nica (i.e. first prize) in the Interactive Art+ category of world-renowned festival Ars Electronica. The artistic project  Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria is centered around the yellow umbrellla, a symbol of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement. After being repurposed as a parabolic WIFI antenna, the umbrella both extends decentralized connectivity as well as covers and protects citizens holding it. More info on Ars Electronica Website.

fibel.digital presented at 5th virtual meeting of AG Leseverstehen

1653021337 / AE520520

With a talk entitled "Digital exercise material for systematic (syllable-based) learning to read implementing speech recognition algorithms" , the prototype of the project fibel.digital has been presented for the first time to audience of German experts in domain of elementary school didactics and alphabetisation. Interactive presentation of the talk is accessible on the domain lesen.digital.

Talk on archives for Design & Computation students

1651860585 / AE520506

A talk "An archive, an arc hive or the anarchive: prolegomena to Knowledge Management System(s) for any future human or trans-human ally" was given today to students of TU/UdK Design & Computation study program. From ἀρχε of pre-Socratic philosophers, through role of archives in life of past and current institutions, all the way to SQL, semantic web and blockchain, talk provided many insider insights into cores datastructures of kyberia.sk and kastalia.medienhaus digital communities and knowledge graphs.

lesen-mikroserver repository on GitHub

1648631964 / AE520330

DigiEduBerlin team is happy to announce that first release of a small but powerful open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) package "lesen-mikroserver" which is, from now on, available on Github here: https://github.com/hromi/lesen-mikroserver.

lesen-mikroserver is based on code from wonderful coqui speech-to-text (STT). server-side component of "lesen-mikroserver" is able to run inferences on 512-Volta tensor cores of Xavier Jetson Dev Kit GPUs devices and will be used exhaustively in the context of lesen.digital and fibel.digital projects.

Note also our small but tidy getUserMedia -> mediaRecorder -> Websocket -> Jetson -> Browser client which is more or less all You need to bring state of the art ASR / STT in Your pupil's browsers.

More than dozen student project presented at WTF edition of Futurological congress AE920214

1647971138 / AE520322

More than dozen unique and often mind-blowing student projects realized by students of "Educatio Digitale" and "Introduction to Optimization in Coding & Making" were presented during the WTF edition of Futurological Congress AE920214. From ancient writing automata and I-Ching oracle in the browser through binary counting and addition on human hands all the way to GPT-3 driven moral machines, the congress which took place in Medienhaus Aula exactly a week before Russia's coward invasion of Ukraine concluded with dignity and slight dose of humor three semesters of CoVid-19 pandemics.

First international presentation of teacher.js at IEEE ECEI 2022

1647970185 / AE520322

Lightweight but powerful outdoor on-line teaching framework teacher.js was presented at 5th IEEE Eurasian Conference on Educational Innovation (ECEI 2022). A pre-print of the associated article is available here.

UdK involved in very first iteration of the Synthux Academy Hackathon

1644570392 / AE520211

With the course "Audial Bodies" given collaboratively by prof. Hromada (Digital Education) and prof. Greinke (Wearable Computing), UdK was the very first institution ever at which one instance of the Synthux Academy Hackathon ever took place. As all other participants of the hackathon - including Design Academy Eindhoven, Princeton University, Birmingham City University, Caragiale National University, Politehnica University of Bucharest, Betzalel Academy, Fontys University Eindhoven and University of Colorado Boulder - 4 groups composed of student issued from diverse UdK study programs used powerful Daisy Seed Microcontrollers to explore diverse means of transformation of movement into sound. Join the Synth Conference to know more.

Article "Three Principles, 2 Sub-principles and One Magic Wand for Harm Minimization and Prevention of Technological Addiction in Human Children" published in EIET

1644566406 / AE520211

Article "Three Principles, 2 Sub-principles and One Magic Wand for Harm Minimization and Prevention of Technological Addiction in Human Children" has been published in a peer-reviewed journal "Educational Innovations and Emerging Technologies" 

Departing from the definition of techno-addiction in terms of technology-assisted behaviour with probable detrimental consequences, we propose following guidelines could direct the design of harm-reducing technologies: gradual use-constraining, circadianity, offline preferentiality, environmental referentiality and monotasking. These guidelines can serve as criteria according to which digital technologies can be evaluated. Also, these principles can direct design of post-smartphone digital technologies which will, hopefully, reduce the cognitive and physiological harm caused by unreflected deployment of current technologies. As a concrete example of such harm-reducing technologies, we provide first insights into the structure and function of a “magic wand”, a make-your-own-device digital artefact satisfying the above-mentioned guidelines.

Article is available here: https://www.iikii.com.sg/journal/EIET/1/1/5

teacher.js presented at University:Future Festival 2021

1634222079 / AE511014

Lightweight, low-bandwidth on-line teaching framework "teacher.js" developped by  Frederic Brodbeck (member of UdK/ECDF Digitale Education team ) for the purpose of the teacher.solar project will be presented to the wider public for the first time on 2nd November at 11:45 as part of EdTech section of the 2021 edition of the University Future Festival. Feel free to join us, there will be some live demo taking place.

Kastalia KMS presentation which accompanied the talk is available here.

Presentation at NFDI4Culture Digitalisation Barcamp

1633718133 / AE511008

Presentation "Haptic interface for segmentation and annotation of audiotextual corpora" was presented today at a very agreeable NFDI4Culture digitalisation barcamp. Presentation describing one of the main innovations behind the fibel.digital project is available here.

Website of DigiEduPrimer Hackathon activated

1633506563 / AE511006

Official website for the DigiEduPrimer hackathon activated: https://digieduhack.com/en/digieduprimer.

Join us on 9th and 10th November in addressing the challenge "Fostering Reading Acquisition with Digital Tools".

Let's help children learn how to read !

"A talk which never took place" concluded the zeroth edition of Crypto Castle Symposium

1629994059 / AE510826

Voynich Manuscript article now at arXiv

1629188763 / AE510817

An older article "Can Evolutionary Computation Help us to Crib the Voynich Manuscript ?" is now available at the scientifc paper repository arXiv. Departing from the postulate that Voynich Manuscript is not a hoax but rather encodes authentic contents, our article presents an evolutionary algorithm which aims to find the most optimal mapping between voynichian glyphs and candidate phonemic values. Lists of feminine names stemming from different languages are used as a crib and VM section known as "Zodiac", resp. "Calendar" is used as ciphertext. Interesting results are obtained especially when lists of slavic feminine names (including diminutives) resp. hebrew feminine names (with order of characters reversed) are used as the crib. Article is available here.

Introductory talk "What is AI about?" to students of UdK's GWK

1625238738 / AE510702

A link to short lecture addressing the answer "What is Artificial Intelligence about ?" presented to GWK students of prof. Gasteier is here.

teacher.js prototype presented at 0th edition of Berlin Open Lab Symposium

1621334743 / AE510518

Early prototype (pre-alpha) of an online "browse together" code-casting teaching tool "teacher.js" which is developed by Frederic Brodbeck for the purpose of teacher.solar project was used as a main presentation tool at this year's edition of Symposium of Berlin Open Lab. The presentation, which summarizes main projects of UdK/ECDF Digital Education team - i.e. Personal Primer, fibel.digital and teacher.solar - is available here.

Udk2030 Documentation NFT Token

1615482603 / AE510311

For the publication of Udk2030 Documentation the team generated a specific ERC 721 token which is minted in the ethereum testnet rinkeby. Every token is unique and represents one of 23 special physical books which is printed with a private key for the corosponding ethereum wallet. We will experiment with this system of distribution to evaluate if through the digital record the content can be expanded in the future. Find the token contract here.

Small syllabic lexicon of german words added to fibel.digital contents

1615391150 / AE510310

A lexicon consisting of audiotext recordings of syllabized pronounciations of 327 german words is, from now on, available at the address https://fibel.digital/KleinesSyllabischesLexikon . These extends the set of already existing audiotext contents (Grimm Brother Fairy Tales (DE), german Tongue Twisters and English Tongue Twisters) with a new set of contents which are of particular importance within the process of acquisition of reading skills.

The small syllabic lexicon of german language is also the first set of audiotext contents which creates associations between sounds and symbols on a syllabic level.

Teacher.solar project initiated

1614343756 / AE510226

Just presented the project "Teacher.solar :: open source/hardware toolbox for low bandwidth CO2-neutral online outdoor teaching" at the first meeting of 2020 stifterverband fellows.

Short, lightning talk presentation is here, a more exhaustive one here.

Kastalia KMAS presented at AG Online Lehre

1614258947 / AE510225

Knowledge Management and Archivation System (KMAS) "Kastalia" was presented today to members of UdK's action group "Online Lehre" initiated and curated by UdK's president prof. Norbert Palz. Presentation is accessible here.

fibel.digital webapp alpha version activated

1612131107 / AE510131

We are happy to announce that alpha version of web component of the digital Primer project is, from now on, accessible at the address fibel.digital.

Essentially, the web component is based around the idea of audiotext, i.e. temporally aligned, synchronized text and audio* First audiotext contents which are, from now on, publicly available on the project website are audiotext of most famous Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm, as recorded, modified and annotated by student assistant Dorothea Müller.

Audiotexts are transferred to the public domain under conditions of Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence.

Senior Fellowship in Innovations in University Teaching

1612130444 / AE510131

Prof. Dr. Daniel Hromada has been awarded one of four Senior Fellowships for "Innovation in University Teaching" by the Stifterverband. The ECDF professor received the fellowship, which is endowed with 25,000 euros, for his project "Teacher.solar: open source/hardware toolbox for CO2-neutral online outdoor teaching".

More info: https://teacher.solar Einstein Center Digital Future Stifterverband

First BigBlueButton Level B1 Presentation given

1611314330 / AE510122

Berlin University of the Arts is slowly but steadily adopting BigBlueButton as its main videoconferencing system. A little lecture "BigBlueButton Schooling Level B" contained some few practical tips and tricks for intermediate users of this wonderful on-line learning system.

Running tensorflow lite on a pi zero (armv6)

1606401947 / AE501126

As an important step in development and evaluation of models for embedded speech recognition, the team of Digitale Bildung made the machinelearning framework tensorflow lite and the associated python3 bindings [tflite_runtime] run on armv6 architecture. A comprehensive guide and the binaries can be found here.

Kastalia KMS already containing more than 11111 knots

1606128472 / AE501123

The amount of basic units of knowledge, so called "knots" stored in the database of a Knowledge management system Kastalia. lately surpassed the cricital quantity of 11111 knots. Here You can see how the knot 11111 looks like when processed by means of the reveal.js template.

Unabriged version of the article "Integer-based nomenclature for the ecosystem of lexically repetitive expressions in complete works of William Shakespeare" now under Open Access

1606127686 / AE501123 , https://doi.org/10.25624/kuenste-1331

What do William Shakespeare's Falstaff, Prospero, Miranda, Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, PERL-compatible regular expressions, Einstein Center Digital Future, #UdK, computational #rhetorics, #argument, #computation, morally restricted Genral Public License and a domain refused.science have in common ? Well, they are linked, in one way or another - to and by the paper "Integer-based nomenclature for the ecosystem of lexically repetitive expressions in complete works of William Shakespeare", one among the most strange yet most important papers I've ever written.

Thanks to UdK's Opus repository, the paper - also containing some goto-statement-containing source code ;) - is now officially available under Open Access. Having a DOI of their own, Shakespeare and Entangled numbers are now ready to (serve|amuse) You. Enjoy!

udk2030.digital :: a beautifully human success

1604662951 / AE501106

A little cooking recipe for organisation of a first fully digital version of UdK's Zukunftstag: 10% mail & 5% Webex to ignite the spark. Then 70% of Medienhaus/ and 15% of BigBlueButton.

And a wonderful, wonderful project event organization group !

Result: More than 130 simulatenous users in 4 parallel conference tracks. An on-line event running non-stop for more than 12 hours. All this consuming less than 50% resources of a couple of local, non-corporate, university-hosted BigBlueButton servers.

Goodbye Zoom, goodbye Slack!

Project proposal "UdK2030 Holo-Chronik v0.1" obtains KKWV funding

1604230951 / AE501101

Project of creation of 0th holographic chronicle of UdK's Future Day got funded by University's "Kommission für künstlerische und wissenschaftliche Vorhaben" !

Project proposal presentation here.

Stay tuned for our "holographic line of research" has quite some potential to bring forth quite a dose of unseen beauty!

Nikoloz Kapanadze presents his Esonic ambisonic headset at the workshop of NordiChi conference

1603883766 / AE501028

An UdK alumni, absolvent of Art & Media study program and the first student force assistant of my Digital Education juniorprofessorship, Mr. Nikoloz Kapanadze, just presented his open-source and open-hardware ambisonic headset "Esonic" at the workshop "Programming with moving bodies" of the renowned NordiChi conference. Some slides concerning Nik's project are here.

Medienhaus/ goes into production

1602285803 / AE501009

Article "Digital education: ”education-with” / ”education-about” distinction and the teleological definition" now under Open Access

1601977742 / AE501006 , https://doi.org/10.25624/kuenste-1326

New Team Member: Hibiki Ishima

1596285235 / AE500801

The Digital Education Team grows: From 1.August 2020 Hibiki joined the team as a student assistant. She is currently studing at the University of Arts in the newmedia class and will work on the hardware of the Digital Primer. Some of her projects can be found here

Participation in the 9th Münster Workshop for School Informatics 2020

1591274035 / AE500604

The Digital Education Team presented the Digital Primer project at Münster School Informatics Workshop . This year's workshop topic "Mobile with informatics" was a perfect match for the contribution "Building instructions for a digital primer by and for your pupils" presented by the Digital Education Team. In the accompanying publication four characteristics of the Digital Primer are explained and a building instruction for a prototype is given. The publication in volume can be found here .

Presentation 'Make Your Pupil’s Embooked, Voluminous, Modular and Unique Digital Primer' is available here.

Digital Primer Code is now on Github

1589290105 / AE500512

At the URL https://github.com/hromi/Digital-Primer You will find some necessary software bricks which will allow You to create Your own variant of a digital Primer (DP). DP is a new kind of medium whose raison d'etre is to educate. Its ideal hardware embodiment looks like a book and hadigital primers multiple properties of a book. Instead of using screens, device uses e-ink displays (mostly using IT8951 controller) to present visual or textual content. Strong emphasis is to be put on speech technologies (automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis) and touchless human-machine interaction. Recommended platform: Raspberry Pi Zero running Raspbian OS.

New team Member: Paul Seidler

1585744435 / AE500401

Paul Seidler joined the Digital Education Team on the 1.April 2020. He studied at the University of Arts in the newmedia class and was working before in various research facilities, including the Design Research Lab and the Hybrid plattform .  His projects and papers have been presented at CTM, Transmediale, Dutch Design Week. His current focus is on Software design and development of the Digital Primers.

Prototype 1 of a digital Primer presented at ECDF's Industry Day

1579619739 / AE500121

First prototype of a novel kind of digital education medium, a so-called "Digital Primer" (DP) or a "digitale Fibel" was presented to public at the Industry Day of Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) on 21st January 2020. Design, realization and optimization of a digital Primer is the main research & design project of Daniel D. Hromada, digital education juniorprofessor affiliated to both ECDF as well as to Faculty of Design of Berlin University of the Arts.

Distinctive innovations brought about by the DP's prototype 1 include, but are not restricted to:

- three e-paper displays (two major ones to create a book-like experience, third used for cover)
- voice & e-ink text synchronisation
- interaction mainly by means of gestures and offline automatic speech recognition systems
- A5 format
- first lesson of Bildung Digitale curriculum and first instance od Berliner Digitale Leseprobe

OEB.global brings Steiner's, Montessoris and Freinet's ideals into the RaspberryPi age

1575030835 / AE491129

Talk "CO2-Neutrality and Digital School: can we align them ?" now on-line

1574259382 / AE491120

By clicking here, You will obtain access to the presentation just presented within the track "eCampus / Nachhaltigkeit in Verwaltung und Forschung" of the Hamburg conference Campus Innovation. Thanks to Visuelle Kommunikation student Niklas Apfel for playful illustrations.

Kastalia KMS presented at UdK Zukunftstag 2030

1572957235 / AE491105 , Berlin

Version v0.42 of the knowledge-management system (KMS) Kastalia has been presented as part of 2nd "Future day" organized by Berlin University of the Arts. Installation named "kastalia.medienhaus v0.42 :: 4 views" was a first public display of the system which is, since winter semester 2016 used as a singular tool for creation of collaborative presentations by study programs Kunst und Medien (KuM) and Visuelle Kommunikation (VK) of UdK's Faculty of Design.

As of 24th october 2019 kastalia's database contained 3846 "knots" ("Ding an sich") interconnected with "5226" bounds which can be displayed (as "Ding für uns") by > 79 different templates, thus generating at least 69 * 3846 = 265374 distinct and unique "views".  What was presented at UdK's Zukunfstag were four such views.

In short, Kastalia can be described as a collaborative swiss-knife of web-publishing, data-management and archivation. Asides being used as a collaborative presentation tool by all classes, workshops and labors of VK and KuM study programs,  kastalia also played a minor role in archiving the outputs of first edition of UdK2030, plays an instrumental role in creation of german-language corpus for the project of digital primer (digitale fibel) and is a backend for systems as diverse as Medienhaus cafeteria display, repetitio.digital.udk-berlin.de as well as the website You are reading in this very moment (e.g. bildung.digital.udk-berlin.de).

Invited talk about reduction of energy trace of UdK’s Medienhaus at Klasse Klima

1572786833 / AE491103

It has been a big pleasure to present a talk "Circadian and eutark reduction of energy trace of UdK’s Medienhaus" to students of UdK's Klima Klasse.

What was supposed to be a 20-min talk about circadian and eutark devices turned into a 90-min interactive talk spanning topics as diverse as Bildung Digitale, Lean ICT on one hand and photobioreactors, Wendelstein 7-X or carbon-sequestrating paints on the other.

@klasse.klima Instagram announcement is here and the on-line version of the presentation is available here.

Invited talk at Campus-Innovation conference

1572698035 / AE491102 , Hamburg

As a follow-up to article about circadian and eutark artefacts, I have been invited to Campus-Innovation conference at Hamburg in order to hold a talk: "CO2-Neutrality and Digital School: can we align them?".

List of other conference participants here.

repetitio.digital.udk-berlin.de up & running

1571661235 / AE491021 , Berlin

A series of 23 "aphorisms" dealing with the topic of "Repetition" is being gradually added at https://repetitio.digital.udk-berlin.de.

The project has been initiated by request from authors of UdK Journal, the main printed medium of Berlin University of the Arts. Printed introduction to the art-work is "Ewige Wiederholung des Wiederholendes" can be found on a double-spread of pages 14 and 15 of 7th issue of the journal.

Asides being the first project combining the D3.js frontend with the kastalia.medienhaus backend, the repetition aphorisms can be considered to be first texts written by Daniel D. Hromada in german language.

Article "After smartphone : Towards a new digital education artefact" published in Revue Enfance

1570710835 / AE491010 , 10.3917/enf2.193.0345

Article "After smartphone : Towards a new digital education artefact" published in Revue Enfance

Paris; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/enf2.193.0345

Article "After smartphone : Towards a new digital education artefact" is now made available by Revue Enfance, one of the most oldest (est. 1948) continental scientific journals in the field of developmental psychology and published by renowned publishing house "Presses Universitaires de France".

The article is a part of an issue 3/2019 dedicated to "Cognitive technologies for childhood" edited by Jacqueline Nadel & Charles Tijus. Its abstract being as follows:

"Non-moderate smartphone usage may induce diverse pathological states and behaviors which may potentially result in an array of syndromes and illnesses. Digital devices built for education rather than consumption and entertainment should not neglect intricacies of human physiology, ergonomy and cognition. For this reason, we present first four properties of an idealized “digital primer” artefact which could maximize the human and cultural potential of a normal elementary school pupil by means of holistic, semi-supervised interaction. Properties addressed and defined in this article are: “speech-based”, “narrative”, “circa-temporal” and “habit-disrupting”."

In its appendix, the article is also a 1st scientific publication contains a list of 23 characteristics of a digital primer, as proposed since 2016 on fibel.digital.

Fulltext is available here for a 5 € fee.

Make Your Own Device (MYOD) to be introduced at oeb.global

1568291635 / AE490912 , Berlin

Happy to announce that presentation ""Make Your Own Device": When Digital Education Marries Reform Pedagogy" shall be presented on 29th November to attendees of the oeb.global conference as part of the Teaching Skills and Competences for Tech-enabled Futures Starts at School: the New Digital Literacy Curriculum panel. Full program of oeb.global conference is available here.

Podcast about Digital Primer broadcasted @ SWR2 Radio

1566390835 / AE490821 , Berlin

Brief description of the digital Primer ("digitale Fibel") project in its earliest stage + some other remarks concerning the usage of AIs in education + an excerpt from a RaspberryPi TTS-synthetized variant of an old Slovak fairy-tale, all this and some more was part of the program "Lerning in the robotic era" broadcast by SWR2. You can download the podcast variant which You can download here. Article summarizing the Podcast is available here.

Thanks the SWR2 journalist Ms. Silvia Plahl for an agreeable interview.

First batch of digital artefacts presented at UdK's Rundgang

1562934835 / AE490712 , Berlin

Less then one year after introduction of Digital education at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), we have already managed to present some working artefacts to wider audience during UdK's event of the year, a so-called Rundgang.

Main exhibits included: Avatar0 (created in collaboration with Christian Schmidts) communicating with visual installation In Praise of Void by Akif Sari; PappeFibel0 (the core prototype of the fibel.digital project); touchless musik instruments Schale (physical setup by Kohei Kimura), Ukulele (Nik Kapanadze, Anna Petzer); drumming plants Cyberplant0 and Cyberplant1 and binaural headphones sonic by Nik Kapanadze.

Consistently with the "Make Your Own Device" (MYOD) philosophy, majority of artefacts hereby introduced is based on Raspberry PI hardware, GNU/Linux operating system and tend to include at least one upcycled component.

First participation at Berlin's Long Night of the Sciences 2019

1560602035 / AE490615 , Berlin

Artefacts PappeFibel0 and Cyberplant0 were presented during the event "Long Night of the Sciences" at Einstein Center Digital Future (sometimes also known as "House of digitalization"). A more elaborate report about the event is available here.

Article "Circadian and eutark reduction of energy trace of a digital school" accepted for publication

1551789235 / AE490305 , Berlin

Article thematizing two properties (circadian and eutark*) of digital yet sustainable digital education devices has been just accepted for publication in 7th volume of "Fachmagazin für Digitalisierung in der Lehr Synergie". Publication date is 22 May 2019 (AE490522). 

*word "eutark" is not a typo but a neologism meaning "energy-autark", i.e. "able to produce energy necessary for own operation"

Prolegomena students organize 0th edition of "The futurological congress AE100

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Faculty of Design of Berlin University of the Arts

The zeroth edition of the course "Digital Culture :: Prolegomena to Educatio Digitale :: Historical Context" finished by a "congress" organized by students and for students. Congress interventions included: presentation of a string&pulley-based logical gates (NOT, AND, NAND, XOR, OR, buffer); Digi-Comp2 paper-based replica; video about a somewhat unhappy cyborg; unveiling of the Pygmallion tableau and referats about Ada Lovelace and digital sounds in everyday life.

Prolegomena students meet prof. Zuse

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Vivisection of digital infrastructure of UdK's Medienhaus

1543494835 / AE481129

Symposium Digitalisierung UdK Berlin /// Eine Anatomie, UdK, Berlin

Presentation of the talk "Vivisection of digital infrastructure of UdK's Medienhaus, as executed by an ex-IT-Admin" is now available in the Kastalia Knowledge Management System und is accessible here.

To BYOD or not to BYOD in an elementary school ?

1542890035 / AE481122

Hybrid Platform TU / UdK, Berlin

Should elementary school pupils bring their own devices into school or not ? Some pro- and contra- arguments, as well as an answer to this highly actual question have been presented at the 33rd Hybrid Talk dedicated to "Learning". An impress.js presentation is available here.

Core of Fibel's speech recognition engine compiled on an embedded-system

1542544435 / AE481118

Faculty of Design of Berlin University of the Arts

Happy to announce that the state-of-the-art Kaldi Automatic Speech Recognition system has been just successfully compiled on an embedded Rock64 platform.

First evaluations of the Prolegomena series

1542285235 / AE481115

Prolegomena to Educatio Digitale initiated

1540470835 / AE481025

UdK Wintersemester 2018/2019 courses

1539606835 / AE481015

Presentation @ ECDF 2018 Industry Forum

1539174835 / AE481010

Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlins
A short presentation "Digital Primer :: Speech-technologic fostering of literacy in dyslectic children" presented at ECDF's 1st Industry Forum is available here.