The communication practised by politicians is highly calculated, supporting their aim to transport their own messages and to sway the voters. Applying a linguistic perspective, Marta Degani has studied speeches by US-American politicians, including election addresses by Barack Obama, but also by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Visual search allows humans to identify certain objects: For example, a doctor can recognise dangerous anomalies in x-ray images, or airport security staff can use x-ray technology to identify items inside our hand luggage. At the Department of Psychology, Anna Conci, recipient of an ÖAW-DOC scholarship, is studying the influence of the working memory on the search performance. Read more →
To simplify our daily routines, devices designed for the “Internet of Things (IoT)” are usually equipped with cameras that can record images and videos, and transmit these to other devices. Subhan Ullah’s research focuses on increasing the security of these systems, which often have limited processing capacities. He has recently completed his doctoral thesis.
Mediatisation has fundamentally transformed our interactions with medical professionals, our attitude to our own health, and our communication about health-related topics. In her research, Isabell Koinig deals with health communication. She addressed some of the phenomena which research has only taken up selectively, and whether she turns to Google herself when she feels a bit under the weather.
Weighing in at just over 800 pages, the recently published Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom was edited by Robert J. Sternberg (Cornell University) and Judith Glück (University of Klagenfurt). The handbook offers an overview of the state of research on wisdom, an area of study that is still something of a rarity at universities, and presents various perspectives describing how a greater understanding of wisdom could contribute to a better world.
While the consequences of smoking, drinking alcohol, being active etc. have been carefully researched and are well understood as far as life expectancy is concerned, very few studies explore how individual decisions which result in becoming a parent or getting married influence the probability of dying and causes of death. Miguel Portela (Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal) and Paul Schweinzer (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) have recently conducted studies using data from Great Britain. Their biblically inspired conclusion is: “Let the little children come to me.”
Juliana Padilha Leitzke came to Klagenfurt from Brazil in order to write her doctoral thesis and to contribute to reducing the risk of undetected hazardous ice on aircraft wings. She expects to complete her doctoral thesis shortly.
In-flight icing of aircraft wings represents one of the biggest safety risks in aviation. Researchers have developed new wireless sensors allowing improved detection of ice formation. Read more →
Every year, around 8,400 employees transport more than 100 million tonnes of goods on behalf of Rail Cargo Austria. 620 traction units and 21,500 goods wagons are required purely for rail cargo operations. In the case of highly complex logistics tasks such as this, the deployment of man and machine requires careful planning. Mathematicians working on a project funded by FFG are now developing algorithms designed to significantly enhance the planning process.
Economists endeavour to emulate the behaviour of actors in economic contexts in order to calculate the consequences. The difficulty is this: Many at times restrictive assumptions concerning the behaviour of actors do not reflect the real world. A new project funded by the Anniversary Fund of the OeNB (Oesterreichische Nationalbank) aims to get a better grasp on reality.
