Integration and interfacing of Fab Labs into a distributed e-learning mulse-media e-infrastructure

NEWTON (Networked Labs for Training in Technologies for Information and Communication) is an integrated project funded by EU under the Horizon 2020 ICT-2015 program on technology enhanced learning (TEL). NEWTON consortium comprises 14 among Universities, SME’s and large companies of 7 European countries.

The NEWTON project goals are to:
1. develop, deploy and disseminate a set of new technology-enhanced learning mechanisms involving multi-modal and multi-sensorial media distribution,
2. develop, integrate, deploy and disseminate state of the art technology-enhanced teaching methodologies including augmented reality, gamification and self-directed learning to ease system access and learning to users from secondary and vocational schools, third level education and further education, including students with physical disabilities,
3. build a large platform that links all stakeholders in education, enables content reuse, supports generation of new content, increases content exchange in diverse forms, expands existing practices, develops and disseminates new teaching scenarios, and encourages new innovative businesses.
4. perform personalisation and adaptation for content, delivery and presentation in order to increase learner quality of experience and to improve learning process, and
5. validate the platform impact and the effectiveness of the teaching scenarios in terms of user satisfaction, improvement of the learning and teaching experience, etc. and the underlying technology through an European-wide real-life pilot with 4 different scenarios.

To address the problematic of the thesis, the PhD student will have to collaborate with the international partners of the consortium to leverage several scientific and technical locks:
1. First of all, the PhD student will have to perform a bibliography study on the topics related to fab labs and their integration and interfacing into a distributed environment with a SOA architecture in order to support remotely-controlled fabrication batches.
2. Then, he/she will have to identify limitations of existing state of the art, design and develop algorithms and protocols to address those limitations and improve system performance and, finally, investigate the architecture and the implementation of inclusive interfaces to support the access of students with some degree of disability (e.g. hearing or visual impairments) to the fab-lab infrastructure.
3. The PhD student will also have to set-up a test environment for the implemented algorithms and interfaces, monitor the underlying infrastructure and stress it in real use cases, analyze the results and find objective indicators to measure the teaching and learning outcomes in the different use cases.
4. Finally, he/she will have to write papers and defend them in international conferences or submit them to international journals.