First Doctoral Programme at St. Pölten UAS

Within the framework of the doc.funds.connect programme, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Christian Doppler Research Association (CDG) are funding a cooperative doctoral programme of the St. Pölten UAS and TU Wien for the first time.

The programme is dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage with the help of digital technologies. Historical photographs and amateur films are digitalised and analysed. The funding volume amounts to one million EUR.

“This is the first doctoral programme to largely take place in Lower Austria’s capital city. We are very happy about the funding for our cooperative doctoral programme. This gives our researchers the opportunity to intensively work on the link between basic research and applied research”, says Hannes Raffaseder, CEO of the St. Pölten UAS. In the PhD programme titled “Visual Analytics and Computer Vision Meet Cultural Heritage” (VaCoViCu), the St. Pölten UAS collaborates with TU Wien.

Analysing and Presenting Digitised Visual Media

The objective of the research programme is to explore possibilities for the preservation of cultural heritage through digital technologies. “It provides great added value for society to analyse digitised visual media such as historical photographs and amateur films with computer assistance and to derive knowledge from them”, explains Wolfgang Aigner, coordinator of the programme and head of the St. Pölten UAS’ Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies.

Capturing the content of the visual media and gaining new insights takes methods that connect efficient automated data analysis and expert knowledge. VaCoViCu examines approaches to automated image analysis and visualisation in order to open up historical media collections and make them accessible for a large group of users.

“One central aspect in this context is the interdisciplinary approach including elements of computer science on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other. In this thematic field, the St. Pölten UAS has already carried out many high-level interdisciplinary research projects with various collaboration partners”, says Aigner.

Doctoral Education in Lower Austria

“I am very pleased that the St. Pölten UAS has succeeded in landing a ‘doc.funds.connect’ project and I would like to congratulate everyone involved in this great achievement. I am convinced that this new doctoral education will further increase the already strong appeal of the St. Pölten UAS in education and research. Our scientific institutions in general are becoming more and more successful when it comes to raising third-party funds. The FWF alone recently awarded three million EUR to Lower Austrian institutions. This shows once again that Lower Austria has established itself as a science location”, says Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Governor of Lower Austria, who is full of praise.

“As the capital city of Lower Austria, St. Pölten has a central function as a site of higher education. In this context, the new cooperative doctorate programme of the St. Pölten UAS and TU Wien is an important extension of our academic education opportunities and a decisive step towards the town’s further positioning as an international university location”, explains Mayor Matthias Stadler, thus emphasising the importance of the programme.

Innovative Institute

The Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies at the St. Pölten UAS is one of the biggest research institutions in the Austrian universities of applied sciences landscape. Almost 70 scientists and 12 student researchers are involved in approximately 80 projects. At the moment, the institute has four habilitated researchers.

Over the past five years, there were ten researchers who worked in projects at the institute and were supervised by full-time habilitated scientists but could receive their doctoral education at a university only. Thanks to the new doctoral programme, however, the St. Pölten UAS now has additional possibilities to supervise PhD students.

• Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies at the St. Pölten UAS

Programme doc.funds.connect

Within the framework of the doc.funds.connect programme, doctoral programmes with a total volume of just above four million EUR are created. All in all, the FWF funds four new programmes with 20 new PhD places.