Joint Working Group Critical AI Engineering, Digital Humanities and Educational Transfer
Welcome to Caedhet
CAEDHET is an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional working group that works on projects in the field of generative artificial intelligence and discusses related issues. The focus is on critical engineering: technical work closely connected with a critical-ethical reflection.
Structure and objectives
Within the framework of CAEDHET, scientists from the Heidelberg University of Education and the University of Heidelberg are cooperating with each other, organized by the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH) and the Heidelberg School of Education (HSE). The working group serves not only for exchange, but also for networking and mutual support.
For this purpose, HCDH and HSE provide the necessary infrastructure (rooms, etc.) as well as access to their networks and contacts.
CAEDHET sees itself not only as an interface between the two universities, but also as an interface between four often widely distant perspectives of content: AI engineering, Digital Humanities, Educational Transfer and Critical-ethical Reflection. All of the working group's projects focus on these four perspectives, with varying degrees of emphasis:
- AI Engineering: With this we mean the experimental approach to LLM architectures, i.e. especially the perspective of interpretability research and explainable AI (xAI).
- Digital Humanities: In this context, we understand the collective term to mean computer-aided analysis methods in the disciplines of humanities, which means corpus linguistic analysis methods and natural language processing (NLP) at the interface with AI.
- Educational Transfer: A fundamental problem of the scientific study and social classification of AI as a new technology is the communication of rapidly changing bodies of knowledge. Only with didactic and pedagogical strategies tailored to this can minimum standards of AI literacy or AI maturity be achieved. Here, students of teaching professions in particular take on central roles as multipliers. CAEDHET's work therefore focuses on teacher training.
- Critical Ethical Reflection: We would like to add a specific perspective to the already existing general societal discourse on AI: CAEDHET focuses on the latent interrelationships between technical decisions, their affordances and the resulting ethical problems.
Topic range of CAEDHET
CAEDHET currently consists of
The associate members of CAEDHET are the members of the HCDH Board of Directors. Further associations and participations in the working group are possible.
Dr. Florian Nieser
Dr. Florian Nieser studied German Studies and Theology at the University of Tübingen, where he continued his education in the field of "Digital Humanities". He also completed his doctorate in the field of hero semiotics in Middle High German and Old French texts in Tübingen and he was a visiting scholar in the context of the hero theme at the University of Freiburg in 2023.
Since 2022 he has been the managing director of the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities, where he previously worked as founder and scientific coordinator of the Digital Humanities Forum from 2020. At the HCDH, he deals with the topics of transmediality and digital humanities (computational analysis of texts and LLM-based research areas), among others.
At CAEDHET he is the scientific coordinator of the project group.
Dr. Thomas Renkert
Dr. Thomas Renkert studied Protestant theology at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in systematic theology. Until 2022, he was a research assistant at the institute for diaconal sciences. He is one of the founders and co-editor of "Cursor_ - Journal for explorative theology".
Since 2024, he has been working as a research assistant to the directorate at the Heidelberg School of Education in the field of teacher training, where he is responsible for the focus on "AI maturity and educational justice", among other things.
Jonathan Gaede
Jonathan Gaede studied German Studies and Digital Humanities at the JMU Würzburg and supports the HCDH as a research assistant in the conception and implementation of workshops on DH topics and in communication with the research community. His interdisciplinary dissertation project examines the role of astrological-alchemical secret symbols and "special characters" in the scientific literature of the early modern period.
As part of the CAEDHET project, he is interested in AI in the public and its recognizability.
Dr. Maria Becker
Maria Becker is a research associate at Heidelberg University, affiliated with the Department of German Linguistics and the Institute for Translation and Interpreting. She holds a master’s degree in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology, as well as a PhD in Computational Linguistics. Her research focuses on the application of machine learning methods in Digital Humanities, a key area of her work within the CAEDHET project. Maria's broader research interests include computational social science, explainable AI, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, annotation studies, and science communication.
Mayumi Ohta
Mayumi Ohta obtained her Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computational Linguistics at Heidelberg University. Her Master thesis received a distinction and also a special mention in the best paper award of the 6th International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (LOD). After her graduation, she gathered professional experience as a machine learning expert both in industry and academia in the field of Natural Language Processing. Her current research interests lie in Language Modeling with a special focus on explainability.
Since October 2024, she is a research assistant of SFB 1671 “Heimat(en): Phänomene, Praktiken, Darstellungen”, and working on IT-administarion and AI-applications.
Jonas Braun
Jonas Braun completed his Bachelor of Science in Business Information Systems at the University of Mannheim in 2015 and his Master's in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam in 2019. He worked as an AI/Data Science Consultant from 2019 to 2024. He is currently employed as a research assistant in the MINT-ProNeD project and is part of CAEDHET.
As the Chair of Computer Science Didactics under Prof. Claudia Hildebrandt, he develops teacher training courses and web apps on the subject of data literacy and artificial intelligence. The aim is to convey a basic understanding of data science to teachers and students through a data-based perspective and associated interactive visualizations and locally running machine learning algorithms. His main areas of focus are educational transfer and AI engineering.
Dr. Stefan Pietrusky
After successfully completing his secondary school teaching degree in biology and chemistry at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Master of Education), Dr. Stefan Pietrusky completed a second degree at the Heidelberg University of Education in 2020, which he completed with a Master of Arts in 2022. His research focuses on digital education, in particular the adaptability of digital teaching and learning media, the promotion of data literacy, self-directed learning, the automated generation of learning environments through AI, the development of digital learning games and applications in the field of augmented reality. He is currently working on projects on machine learning, neural networks and deep learning applications.
In addition to his academic work, Dr. Stefan Pietrusky founded the EdTech start-up "Learning Level Up/Down Church Studios" and trained as a graphic designer. At CAEDHET, he works in the areas of AI engineering, educational transfer and ethical reflection.
Dr. Nicole Flindt
Dr. Nicole Flindt, M.A. is head of the Graduate School and managing director of the research department in the Vice Rectorate for Research, Digitization and Sustainability at the Heidelberg University of Education. She studied education and law at the universities of Mannheim and Heidelberg and received her doctorate in e-learning at the University of Heidelberg in cooperation with the software company SAS GmbH. In addition to her research in the field of E-Learning and Artificial Intelligence in schools and universities, neurodidactics, mental health and university research, she is also the project manager of the EU project Young Refugees AI Student Empowerment Program (RAISE), which develops an AI for brain-friendly e-learning portals.
At CAEDHET, she brings her humanities and pedagogical-didactic experience in the field of Digital Humanities on the one hand, and her legal background in the areas of Ethical Reflection and AI Engineering on the other.
Frederick Riemenschneider
Frederick Riemenschneider has a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics. In addition to his current Master's degree in Greek Studies (75%) / Assyriology (25%), he is a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg in Computational Linguistics. His doctoral thesis is on Mechanistic Interpretability in Multilingual Language Models, and his interests relate to ancient languages, especially Ancient Greek.
At CAEDHET he works on AI Engineering and Digital Humanities.
