Bielefeld University

Updated on 23 February 2015

Logo_Uni_Bielefeld_de_185px Bielefeld University contributes to OpenAIRE with two specific units for two specific areas to the proposal: the library for major contributions to the technical e-Infrastructure of OpenAIRE and the CITEC with its highly-profiled researchers in the domain of cognitive systems/interaction/robotics for the focused studies on subject specific requirements.

Bielefeld University Library is not only heavily involved in international initiatives for research infrastructures processing scholarly information (e.g. BASE, DRIVER, PEER, Knowledge Exchange) but has also contributed significantly to shape the German landscape of digital research libraries as well as digital scholarly information services, e.g. through the development of the Digital Library North-Rhine-Westphalia "DigiBib", today hosted by the academic library centre "hbz" in Cologne for nearly 200 libraries. With respect to conventional library services, Bielefeld University Library performs top-notch (Rank 2) on a national scale according to the German university ranking CHE. The main areas of expertise to be contributed to OpenAIRE is resulting from the work on information infrastructures, specifically on aggregating and networking high numbers of open document repositories The search engine BASE, for example, aggregates since 5 years distributed repositories, by providing access to about 20 Mio. publications from 1200 international sources (March 2009). Further contributions concern the linking of repositories to CRIS systems (in the context of Knowledge Exchange) and usage data (in the context of PEER). Since Bielefeld University Library is responsible for general data management aspects in OpenAIRE, it will also lead the studies on subject-specific requirements for primary and secondary research data.

The unit contributing to the focussed studies on subject specific requirements in OpenAIRE is CITEC, the research centre of excellence “Cognitive Interaction Technology” at Bielefeld University funded by the very competitive excellence initiative of the German federal and state governments. 250 scientists from five faculties (biology, informatics, linguistics, physics, psychology and sports science) are working together in order to enhance human-machine interaction by establishing cognitive interfaces that facilitate the use of complex technical systems such as robots through a level of semantic interaction. An additional goal is the study of the processes and functional constituents of cognitive interaction and their replication in technical systems. CITEC's research agenda is organised around four central topic areas: „Motion Intelligence“, „Attentive Systems“, „Situated Communication“, and „Memory and Learning“. CITEC also includes an integrated graduate school gathering around 50 PhD students, and has strategic cooperations with selected partners from industry such as the Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Miele & Cie. KG, and Bertelsmann AG. Researchers participating in CITEC have been involved in European funded projects for many years, particularly in the field of Information and Communication Technologies and Emerging and Future Technologies. For example, the following projects have been implemented in this field: NEMO (Prof. Philippe Blanchard), PASION (Prof. Ipke Wachsmuth), COGNIRON (Prof. Gerhard Sagerer), SPARK (Prof. Holk Cruse) – all 6th Framework Programme. In the 7th Framework Programme, CITEC is cooperating with two European projects: ITALK and ROBOT-DOC (both Prof. Gerhard Sagerer).

Contact persons

Jochen Schirrwagen
Najko Jahn