Seminar Series & HPC Café: Computation & Data

Seminar Series @16:00-17:00 (hybrid) & HPC Café @17:00-18:00 (on-site)

4:00-5:00 (hybrid): Scientific Talk by Andreas Martin (FernUniversität Hagen)
Using natural language processing in adult education research

Adult and continuing education differs from other areas of education in its high degree of heterogeneity and deregulation. This concerns all aspects and subject areas of this field of education: teachers, learners, providers, and especially the topics, contents, target groups, methods, and formats of the learning opportunities. Since learning opportunities rarely follow curriculum guidelines and are mostly adapted to demand at short notice by commercial providers, they can hardly be recorded using standardized methods. The result is a systematic gap in standardized data on continuing education opportunities. The systematic lack of data in this area has led to the utilisation of fundamentally different data sources than standardised surveys for research purposes. 

Of particular interest are course databases that contain non-standardised announcement texts for course offerings. These texts contain the information that customers need to decide whether or not to participate: content, learning objectives, intended use, target group, method, formats, location and time.

The combination of new methods of natural language processing with increasingly affordable technical solutions enables the use of a very large scale of these non-standardised text bases for empirical adult education research.

The contribution presents research results on text classification and topic modelling using LLM and trained transformer models and highlights further possible applications.

5:00-6:00 (on-site): HPC Café

What is the HPC Café?
At the HPC Café, we offer you practical support in aspects of High Performance Computing and related fields – using a peer-to-peer approach. This means you can bring your specific questions, whether they’re about software, code optimization, or parallelization as well as specific questions regarding ANSYS, GNU, User Spack – you name it. We will help you directly or connect you with other researchers facing similar challenges.

Our offer is open to all user groups – whether you’re a beginner or an advanced user. Even if you are reading about HPC for the first time and you are interested in more information, the HPC Café is just the right space for you to connect with people working in this field. 

Stop by, bring your challenges, and let’s find solutions together!