In short time, the digital meeting room has become a common part of everyday life in many workplaces – a fast, easy, and convenient way to meet regardless of one’s location.

However, the hybrid workplace has its limitations, and therefore DIREC has decided to fund a research project involving researchers from Aarhus University, Copenhagen University, the IT University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University in the effort to develop future digital meeting solutions.

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IT solutions must be designed by people for people: digital tools must be intuitive to use and make a difference in our daily lives. In fact, technological solutions should be an extension of human abilities, without us thinking about it.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a key role in the technology that surrounds us every day, and for the way the labour market develops, so that new IT solutions can support human use in the best possible way.

One of Denmark’s leading researchers in the HCI field is Susanne Bødker, a computer science professor at Aarhus University, honored multiple times for her research in human-machine interaction.

Since the 1980s, the researcher from Aarhus has worked to design the Danes’ digital everyday lives and working lives, so that technology develops in a constructive way and takes a critical approach to challenges and opportunities.

Currently, she is particularly interested in how hybrid work challenges companies and employees, and fundamentally changes the interaction and relationship between people in a workplace, for better or worse.

– Hybrid work is becoming increasingly widespread, so we must be critical of the technology’s possibilities and limitations, and of the way we organize ourselves and perform management. For example, when a workplace with several hundred employees decides to enable all kinds of activities to take place hybridly in future, it places new demands on personnel management. It changes the nature of work and meetings when employees must be able always to participate remotely. It affects what can be shared with each other, when and how. In fact, it changes everything that participants see, hear, and experience because on the screen, we are still just ‘flat people’, says Susanne Bødker.

Take a critical and investigative look at your organization

When advising organizations on how to best set up as a modern hybrid workplace, it involves considering both the technology, the physical environment, and the management aspects of hybrid work.

– Companies have very different challenges, and the technology must be considered in the specific context. Are you a software company with employees all over the world, struggling with people who do not want to move to Aarhus? Are you a bank looking to replace physical customer meetings with online meetings? Do you simply want people to have the freedom to work from home and only to show up physically at the office a few days a week? In that case, it will be necessary to organize differently so that people work at the office on the same days. Every company needs to address its own reality and current challenges.

Her many years of research in user interfaces and user experiences have led to new methods and theories that have gained international attention. In 2017, she received an ERC Advanced Grant of over 2 million euros from the European Research Council for research in user interfaces for complex human use of computers and the research project “Common Interactive Objects.” The goal was to investigate the possibility of building open and shareable platforms and communities on the user’s terms – and not on the terms of the computer systems.

Recently, she has been participating in the ReWork project, funded by the Digital Research Centre Denmark. ReWork is a multidisciplinary research project where researchers, several companies, and three recognized artists explore the future of the hybrid workplace and, not least, technologies that support aspects such as human needs, work with relationship and articulation, as well as embodiment and presence.

Inspires more women to pursue a career in information and technology

As one of the few female computer scientists and top researchers in Denmark, she has inspired more young women to choose an IT career, over the years. A theme that is important to her. Therefore, she has been active as a member of the diversity committee at Aarhus University. 

One of her strong arguments to young women is that the development in the information and technology field is fundamental to the development and the future of our society. Therefore, as a computer scientist you can look forward to getting influence, good well-paid jobs, and a high degree of freedom.

With the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more physical objects are connected to the Internet so that they can communicate with each other and with people.

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One of the mayor barriers for using AI and image analysis in the agricultural and food industry is to create confidence that it works. Today, the manual visual inspection of grain remains one of the most important quality assurance procedures throughout the value chain to bring grain from field to table – and to ensure that the farmers get the right price for their grain.

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For most people the term digital microfluidics doesn’t mean a whole lot. But it’s a technology which could revolutionise lab work completely.

“The idea is that whatever a biochemist normally spends a lot of time doing with pipettes, can be done by a chip instead,” Luca Pezzarossa explains and plays a short video of the technology at work.

The lab on a chip is basically a biochemical lab scaled down to the size of a small portable device. The idea is to make tiny droplets of fluid move around on a chip by activating a sequence of electrodes. Luca Pezzarossa’s job is to make the hardware and software work together to move the microfluidic droplets the right way.

“But one thing that is very common in this field is that the people who do this research are not biochemists, ” he says.

The problem with this is that there are real-world constraints, which makes moving the droplets much harder.

“Two droplets cannot go as close as they do in a simulation, because they would touch and merge. Or from a biological point of view, some droplets might leave behind a contaminating residue. Blood that leaves a trail for example, and so other droplets cannot move where this has moved earlier,” Luca Pezzarossa explains.

This represents a difficult problem. To translate from a high-level protocol that is user-friendly – something which is useful for a biochemist – down to a controlling sequence is very difficult. Especially when the constraints are complex real-world issues, like a droplet leaving a contaminating trail of blood on the chip.

“When I presented these challenges at a DIREC seminar, two algorithm-oriented scientists said: ‘This is very cool from a theoretical point of view. We should apply for a DIREC Explore project.’ And we did,” Luca Pezzarossa says.

Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC) supports multidisciplinary research – often with external partners – with the so called Explore projects, which are small agile research projects with the purpose of screening new ideas.

So for most of 2022 he worked with two fellow assistant professors, Eva Rotenberg from DTU Compute and Lene Monrad Favrholdt from University of Southern Denmark, on developing algorithms that could do this scheduling and routing on applied cyber-physical systems – while DTU research assistant Kasper Skov Johansen, who is now a PhD student at DTU, did most of the practical work.

Time was precious when a critical machine component broke down and the new spare part had to be shipped all the way from SANOVO in Denmark to Brazil, where the processing plant was idle in the meantime.

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