Media information 02. March 2021

Lydia Kaiser becomes professor for "Digital Engineering 4.0" at the TU Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future

  • Dr.-Ing. Lydia Kaiser follows the call of the TU Berlin and takes up the professorship for "Digital Engineering 4.0." on March 01, 2021
  • Lydia Kaiser's research will focus on the design of digital transformation in industry, for example in the development of networked household appliances: How can digital technologies support interdisciplinary collaboration between people?
  • The new professorship is based at the TU Berlin and is associated with the ECDF as an endowed professorship

 


New professorship on the digitalization of industry: On March 1, 2021, Dr.-Ing. Lydia Kaiser will follow the call of the Technische Universität Berlin and take up the professorship "Digital Engineering 4.0." at the Faculty of Transportation and Machine Systems. With this appointment, the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) is expanding its research portfolio to include another important aspect of digitalization.

 

The digital transformation affects almost all areas of social life, including the manufacturing industry: technical products and systems are increasingly networked, and various disciplines are now required for their development. This is where Lydia Kaiser's research starts and explores the shaping of these processes through new methodological approaches and the use of digital technologies. Where mainly mechanical knowledge was needed in the past, questions from software technology increasingly have to be answered today, for example in the case of networked household appliances such as washing machines or vacuum robots. Additional data then often also creates added value such as new business models. "I would like to accompany this new, interdisciplinary way of working during the development process with my research. How can this collaboration be designed with digital solutions? The goal is for the solutions used, such as artificial intelligence, to support people in their work," Kaiser explains.

In her research, Kaiser draws on systems engineering approaches. Systems engineering is about designing problem-solving processes in an interdisciplinary way, analyzing challenges within the system and systematically, and developing solutions close to the people involved.

"With Lydia Kaiser, we are gaining an excellent scientist who has gained a lot of experience in applied research - she knows first-hand which opportunities and challenges arise due to networked technical systems," says Prof. Dr. Odej Kao, Chairman of the ECDF.

About the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF)
The ECDF is an interdisciplinary project of Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin and Berlin University of the Arts. The Center for Digitization Research sees itself as a cross-university nucleus for researching and promoting digital structures in science, business and society. The interdisciplinary project creates more links in the field of digitization at the Berlin location, tries out new forms of collaboration and focuses on innovative interdisciplinary cutting-edge research. The ECDF was approved by the Einstein Foundation Berlin in September 2016.