Dr. phil. Karola Pitsch

Dilthey Fellow
(Volkswagen Foundation)

Bielefeld University
Faculty of Technology
Applied Informatics & CoR-Lab
Universitätsstrasse 21/23
D-33615 Bielefeld

Phone: +49-521-106-12240
Fax: +49-521-106-2992
Office: Q2-140
karola.pitsch AT uni-bielefeld.de


Applied Informatics
CoR-Lab
CITEC
SFB 673

Multimodal Interaction & Technology

Research Topics

• Multimodal Interaction, Conversation Analysis
• Human-Robot-Interaction
• Interaction & Technology, Workplace Studies
• Interactional Linguistics
• Classroom Interaction, Social Learning, Immersive Education

Karola’s research focuses on multimodal communication and social interaction in everyday, professional and technologically mediated settings. She investigates the practices by which co-participants sequentially and multimodally coordinate and organize their courses of action. She uses insights from interactional research to inform the design and modeling of Human-Robot-Interaction, and explores how users perceive and co-construct a robot’s interactional skills.
Karola draws on linguistic, ethnographic and Conversation Analytic (EM/CA) methods and attempts - in interdisciplinary projects - to link qualitative and quantitative approaches. Most recently, she has begun to integrate sequential micro-analysis of video-taped recordings with technical approaches (e.g. Motion Capturing, Augmented Reality) and modeling of interaction.

Group & PhD Students

• Marcel Kramer, MA
• Christian Schnier, MA
• Luise Süssenbach, MA
• Malte Wattenberg, MA (with Prof. Dr. H. Brandt-Pook, Wirtschaftsinformatik, FH Bielefeld)

Teaching - SummerTerm 2012

• Interaktion & Technologie, Mo 14 - 16 h

Short Vita

After studying French, Linguistics and History in Bielefeld and Paris (1995 - 2001), Karola received her PhD in Linguistics from Bielefeld University, Germany (2006, Dissertation Award of the Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft). She has since held positions as postdoctoral researcher in EU-projects with the ‘Work, Interaction & Technology’ research centre in the school of Social Sciences at King’s College London, UK (2005 - 2008), and the Applied Informatics group and the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics at Bielefeld University (2008 - 2011). She has undertaken extended research stays at Sorbonne University and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France), UCLA (USA), the universities of Tsukuba and Saitama (Japan), and the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Since 2011, Karola is a Dilthey Fellow funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung, and a fellow in the ZiF Network of Young Scholars. She is Principal Investigator of projects within the CRC 673 ’Alignment in Communication’ and the Centre of Excellence ‘Cognitive Interaction Technology’.