The RealSim project proposal aims to connect machine simulation to reality in the framework of heavy machinery, which is an interdisciplinary application. The results of this project are expected to optimize machine performance, accurately and reliably predict machine failure, and reduce overall development and operation costs, thus, serving the Europe’s priority of green transformation and the United Nation’s sustainable development goal 9. The RealSim project will close the gaps of: (1) Onboard estimations of force and pressure components of heavy machinery; (2) Estimating deformability, cylinder friction, leakage, and valve dynamics of heavy machinery using independent nonlinear Kalman filters; (3) Employing dependent nonlinear Kalman filters in state estimators of heavy machinery; (4) Tuning algorithms for the covariance matrix of plant noise in the state estimation of heavy machinery. I will consolidate and leverage my research career and position as a leading researcher in the field through integration in Assoc. Prof. Mohammad Poursina’s group at the Department of Engineering Sciences of the University of Agder (UiA), Norway. Here, I will acquire hands-on experience of working with actual mechatronic systems and develop efficient control algorithms. I will improve my knowledge of fluid power designing, control theory, instrumentation, and develop efficient coding skills. I will also develop entrepreneurial skills. The skills, knowledge, and international network that I will develop during this fellowship will put me in an excellent position to achieve my long-term goal of becoming a professor with my own independent research group at an esteemed university in EU. This fellowship will help me to prepare a strong ERC Starting Grant application in the future. It will also cater my additional goal of setting-up a research-related start-up in the future.

This project, entitled Fighting Talk: Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism, will examine examples of pre-battle speeches recorded in ancient Jewish literature, to determine how such speeches reflect forms of motivation to violence within Judaism, how such speeches draw from and respond to other literary templates, and to further explore the relationship between literary representations of pre-battle exhortations and their oral counterparts. The principal goal of FTMVAJ is to gather and analyse a comprehensive group of ancient Jewish pre-battle exhortations, using appropriate methodological considerations including but not limited to linguistic analysis, role of violence in the speech, actions anticipated following the speech, the identity of the speaker and audience both within the narrative and as a literary work, and intertextuality. Additionally, I will create a suitable framework for understanding these collected speeches and explicate common features. These features will be further compared with Greek and Roman counterparts to examine the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish examples of ancient pre-battle speech. The project’s goals will be measured by the following deliverables: academic publications, dissemination and communication activities. The research is of significance to several academic fields and has importance for public understanding of differences in core motivations between ethnic and religious groups, and furthermore, any who employ biblical texts to incite collective violence. FTMVAJ also has significant contributions to make for modern contexts, wherein holy texts are used to justify imagined and real violence.

<< Background >>Student success in higher education is essential not only for the individual student but also for society as a whole. Students who drop out of their studies lose a year (or more) they could have invested into something else and society loses a potentially crucial member with specialized training. We believe that educators need to be more engaged in preemptive measures to decrease drop-out rates and support student success. We often meet prospective and first-year students who feel insecure in their new role as independent learners. These students prefer to get the list of correct answers rather than explore the big questions on their own. On the side of the staff, there is an implicit expectation that the students should figure out what information they need and where to find it or that they take the initiative to ask for help if they cannot figure it out. However, even when there is a support apparatus available for the students, they often do not manage to find the right type of support early on.We believe that the responsibility for early integration into the academic community does not lie on the shoulders of the students alone. We also believe that teaching and support staff should do more to reach out to students who struggle with the transition from being a passive consumer of knowledge in lower education to being an active pursuer of knowledge in academia. In order to engage the students and support them in their maturation process, we propose game-based learning as a methodology. We will, therefore, develop a learning game which will target the needs of prospective and first-year students, including elementary information needs, such as “Where is my class?”, and specific study-related needs, such as “How do I find reliable sources for my paper?”, but also train their general problem-solving skills, cooperation, and hypothesis testing abilities.<< Objectives >>Our main goal is to help students take their learning into their own hands and become independent learners who dare to explore, test, fail, and learn from their own mistakes. We want first-year students to feel integrated into the learning community early on, get to know their fellow students and the staff, and be aware of where they can seek help should they need it.Additionally, we want to encourage teaching and support staff at higher education institutions to take more responsibility for student satisfaction and student success. By disseminating our results, we wish to inspire and empower educators to create their own learning games, even without prior programming knowledge. Ultimately, we want to see learning games become an integral part of education at all levels.<< Implementation >>We are going to create a learning game template and a database of quests, games, apps, and code to complement this template. The different quests in the game will target the needs of prospective and first-year students, e.g. introduce key members of staff, teach students how to understand room codes, or how to find relevant sources in the library database. The game template, the database, example games, and all necessary documentation and manuals will be publicly available under the Creative Commons license.The game will be tested at three different locations (in Norway, Germany, and Slovakia) and we will collect data to evaluate the functionality and the impact of the game on drop-out rates and student satisfaction. We will promote the game through several channels, including the project website, a YouTube channel, local and national media, multiplier events for stakeholders in higher education, a graduate ECTS-giving course, and a research conference.<< Results >>The final version of the game with the database of quests, documentation, and manuals will be published on the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform (and on the project website) and will be freely available to all interested stakeholders.We will also produce scientific output in the form of research papers, a graduate course, and a conference where we will document the development, the results, and the effect of the intervention.

PAAL's objective is to investigate the interaction of phonological representations with cognisance, and their relationship to script. We view cognisance as part of the native speaker's core knowledge of their language.This includes generalisations about constraints on phonological representations in terms of features, size and shapes of morphemes, tone and metrical structures. Cognisance is not identical to the phonological representation of particular lexical items; rather, cognisance is the knowledge about what might be a conceivable word in a given language. We argue that cognisance is involved in all levels of language processing and change, in both spoken and written modalities. Speakers may have different vocabularies, but the phonological cognisance of individuals within a speech community should converge. It has been widely claimed that the notion of "phonological awareness" supports script acquisition. We propose that "phonological awareness" has to make sense in terms of cognisance, which is fundamental to all native speakers, regardless of their level of literacy. Novel to our approach is that it makes explicit predictions about the relationship between cognisance and representation and their relationship to script. Most scripts encode aspects of phonological structure but vary across languages and change over time. Even the closely related Germanic languages we primarily investigate, all using Latinate script, differ in their relationship between phonology and script. We compare the Latinate script to Bengali (also an Indo-European language) whose writing system is very different. Our working hypothesis is that phonological cognisance and representation govern spoken and written language processing, language acquisition, and change of all languages. In this interdisciplinary project, we combine expertise and methodologies across the fields of theoretical phonology, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and language change.

Virtual reality (VR) has become a popular and versatile technology that has recently attracted interest from researchers, practitioners and educators alike. The technology offers the potential for all kinds of disciplines and industries, and higher education in particular may also benefit from VR-enhanced education practices. VR simulations and VR collaboration practices especially allow the experience-based acquisition of high-quality skills and competences that are difficult to acquire with other learning methods. Nevertheless, most educators, particularly in higher education, prefer to stick with traditional teaching approaches because they are unsure how to fit VR into their curriculum. Against this background, educators are seeking recommendations regarding how to incorporate suitable VR software and hardware into their curriculum and, in turn, make sustainable investments. This project aims to create guiding material on the use of VR practices in higher education. By offering access to this material, this project encourages educators to implement VR practices such as virtual field trips, distance courses and virtual collaboration rooms, as well as support the use of digital technologies and the online delivery of courses. The focus of this work lies in supporting educators to select appropriate VR practices for teaching target skills and competences. Educators may even teach intercultural competences by offering courses in collaboration with other higher education institutions and, in turn, foster social inclusion. Taken together, this project intends to mitigate barriers to using VR in higher education, enable educators to improve their instructional quality and guide them to make sustainable investments when acquiring VR hardware and software. Four main project activities contribute to the fulfilment of the project’s main objective. Project activities include: (1) the identification of application scenarios and current VR practices in education based on different analyses and a survey, (2) the elaboration of recommendations based on workshops with educators and other collaborative sessions, (3) a prototypical implementation of VR in higher education courses following the previously elaborated recommendations and (4) the dissemination of these recommendations across different channels that target local, regional and national, and worldwide audiences. In particular, this project targets educators in higher education and aims to facilitate their first steps with VR. However, other stakeholders, like educators from various levels, practitioners and researchers, may benefit from the project’s results as well. Moreover, this project’s results will impact partners, participants, educators and other stakeholders on local, regional and national, and European and international levels. A range of project activities aim to improve partners’ and participants’ expertise in VR and how to implement VR practices in higher education. Project partners plan to make project results openly accessible to educators in higher education to help them with the implementation of VR in their courses and programmes. Not only educators in higher education but also stakeholders like researchers and practitioners may benefit from the project’s results. The dissemination strategy targets all stakeholders and includes several digital and non-digital activities such as postings on social media and educational platforms, presentations and talks, as well as reports and articles. Three universities from three countries, i.e. University of Liechtenstein (Liechtenstein), University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) and University of Agder (Norway), are collaborating on this project. In addition, the headquarter of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) with its headquarters at the University of Muenster (Germany) and representatives from the University of Nebraska Omaha (US) support this project as associated partners.