Research Assistant.4250

Job Description

KU is seeking a highly motivated Research Assistant to work on a project related augmented reality and knowledge transfer. Human expertise is a very important part of companies’ intellectual capital. When experts retire, it is difficult to replace them at the same level of expertise. The next few years will see waves of retirements, potentially leading to a net loss of intellectual capital in key industrial sectors. This major demographic trend started back in 2011 when the eldest members of the so-called “Baby Boomer Generation” (those born between 1946 and 1964) began reaching the retirement age of 65. But, that is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the Pew Research Center, in the decade from 2021 to 2030, retirement will involve more than 30% of the U.S. workforce. For businesses worldwide, this massive exodus represents a loss of valuable skills developed over decades in the workforce, strong institutional knowledge, and leadership abilities that are often lacking in younger workers. In today’s Oil and Gas industry, demand for trained workers exceeds international supply, and with increased technological complexity in the workplace, new recruits must quickly acquire the competencies necessary to perform critical tasks. As a consequence, Serious Games have emerged as a natural step forward. In the DE-KNOV project we aims to design platforms incorporating augmented reality and serious games to facilitate knowledge transfer.

We are looking for a Research Assistant to develop gamification techniques for the sake of extracting experts’ knowledge in machine operation and maintenance. The candidate should implement a gamification tool that will be used in a knowledge extraction room based on augmented reality.

Position Requirements
– The candidate should analyze selected scenarios in which experts’ knowledge should be extracted.
– Methods for knowledge extraction (e.g. using gamification) should be developed and implemented specifically to the given scenarios.
– The methods should then be applied to extract the knowledge in the field.
– The extracted knowledge should be represented as digital objects that can be embedded in an augmented reality application.
– The solutions should be evaluated according to quality standards in this field.
– The candidate is expected to publish novel contributions in high-quality journals.
– Adhere to the University’s information security and confidentiality policies and procedures, and report breaches or other security risks accordingly
– Perform other tasks assigned by the Line Manager