Back in October 2020, Prof. Dr. Hans Rüdiger Kaufmann and Prof. Dr. Dolores Sanchez Bengoa organized at their University of Applied Management Studies Mannheim (HdWM) an event called Internal research practice/seminar. The students at the University have a compulsory research period of eight weeks where they conduct empirical research. This research practice requires a tight mentoring and supervision by the professors, in this case Prof. Dr. Kaufmann, to be accomplished on time fulfilling all the steps of academic research. During this period, the Smart-DevOps project was introduced extensively to the students. The students selected some topics where their interest was awoken by the project presentation. Even more, at a later stage some of them even wrote their master dissertation based on Devops and Smart Cities.
Since October 2020 there have been regular research seminars where the students presented the research work in progress, and professors provided detailed feedback. These meetings took place almost every two weeks. The results of this research project turned out into five excellent master theses.
The results of these theses were presented at the 17th Virtual Circle conference on 8-9 April 2021, and the abstract was published in the conference proceedings.
The Centre for International Research in Consumers, Locations and Environments (CIRCLE) is a cross-faculty, pan University research centre initially created at Leeds Metropolitan University. CIRCLE was created in 2003 as a virtual group of researchers within Hospitality & Retailing subject group, Leeds Business School and Innovation North. Today each university has its own CIRCLE which feeds into CIRCLE International and is based across 80 universities across the world.
It hosts an annual conference at differing venues throughout Europe amongst its 80 partner institutions.
During the two days of the conference,master students presented their theses to the audience of 74 and 88 participants, depending on the track.
Master students’ presenters and topics:
- Smart Cities – Smart People. Sean Dzamalija
- A comprehensive study on the elements of a smart education system and the role of IoT for a smart education system. Namrata Ravindra Jadhav and Rashmi Kushwaha
- Smart Cities – Engagement and Participation. Asad Hussain Syed
- Survey and model for data governance with respect to operational needs in different business domains. Mayur Kamble
- The role of smart cities for the circular economy. Lars Schäffner
The event was regarded as highly successful from different perspectives. On the one hand, the students were very happy because it was the first time that they could present their research in front of an academic audience. They appreciated professors’ support very much, and they thank deeply the opportunity of having participated in the Smart-DevOps project. On the other hand, the audience was very interested in the presented topics, and several questions were asked about it. The track chair also congratulated the students for being interested in this very trendy topic.
The students had a great opportunity to get to know the Smart-Devops project. Discovering these topics gave the students a great motivation to research further and become citizens involved in this area. It was a very valuable experience to combine the Smart-DevOps project together with the Master’s programme.