Neu@KOM: Wael Alkhatib

Wael joined KOM a few weeks ago and he’s mainly researching topics in the field of learning such as smart learning in the context of industry 4.0, directed learning, Semantic analysis as well as Machine learning or Natural Language Processing.

Wael, what’s your exact field of research at the moment?

I focus in my research on lifelong learning at the workplace. In the context of industry 4.0, the trend to sustainable competences developments triggers the need for supporting the learner self-directed knowledge acquisition at the workplace. Parallel research on knowledge intensive workplaces came to the very same conclusion work-integrated self-directed learning is one of the cornerstone drivers for the performance of (knowledge) work processes and thus needs to be supported on a technological level. We propose an approach for ontology supported workplace learning. By providing a knowledge graph linking the different concepts with semantical relations, an intelligent system can help a learner by recommending learning resources, experts and learning path.

The challenge is how to extract semantical relations between the different concepts to create the knowledge ontology. Later on, how this knowledge ontology can be used to improve the current state-of-the-art approaches for recommending the learner the potential learning path, resources and experts in a personalized and context-sensitive manner.

How do you think your work will impact the future?

My work hopefully will provide a significant contribution to the workplace learning driven by the new requirements for sustainable competences development in the context of industry 4.0.  I hope that my research will result in an ontology-based learning environment which can be used to align the learning process with the business goals. That can be done by defining work-related ontology and provide the suitable resources to support the learners self-directed learning at the workplace.

What’s your personal target?

A PhD degree is my primary passion being in KOM to contribute more to the research community as well as having better qualifications for my future career. At the Department of Multimedia Communication I found a friendly work environment where all the colleagues support each other. The cooperation and the interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge are vital incentives for me to acquire more experiences in research, teaching and industrial projects.