Professor Morris Jong obtained his Bachelor of Engineering degree (Electronic Engineering) from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Master of Science degree (Computer and Information Technology) from The University of Hong Kong, and Doctor of Philosophy (Education) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He joined the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, CUHK in August 2009. Currently, Professor Jong is the Director of the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also the Co-Chair of the IEEE Education Society Technical Committee on Learning Sciences, as well as the Vice-President of the China Association for Educational Technology Professional Committee on Game-based Learning. Professor Jong’s research interests include learning sciences and technologies, as well as technology-enhanced pedagogic design and implementation. He won CUHK’s Best Innovation Award of Knowledge Transfer in 2013, the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education’s Early Career Researcher Award in 2015, and CUHK’s Young Research Award in 2017. Besides academic research, Professor Jong has been active in serving the community. For example, he has been a member of the Education Bureau’s Steering Committee on Strategic Development of Information Technology in Education, the Quality Education Fund’s Dissemination and Promotion Sub-committee, as well as the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority’s Subject Committee on Information and Communication Technology.
Professor Sergey Avrutin has received his PhD from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts). After completing a one year postdoc at University of Pennsylvania (Institute for Research in Cognitive Science), Avrutin joint the Linguistics Department of Yale University as an Assistant Professor. While at Yale, he was awarded Fulbright Research Grant to carry out a cross-linguistic investigation of child and aphasic speech. In 2000 Avrutin received a PIONEER grant from the Dutch Academy of Sciences and moved to The Netherlands. He is currently a Professor of Comparative Psycholinguistics at Utrecht University and the Chair of the Linguistics Department at Utrecht University. Avrutin’s research interests include language development and language impairment and application of information theory to psycholinguistics. More recently, together with his colleagues, Avrutin research interests turned towards the relationship between physics and cognition, specifically the laws of thermodynamics and the constructal law as applied to artificial grammar learning, lexical access and sentence processing.
A. Pfennig was born in Büdelsdorf, Germany in 1970. She studied Minerology at the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University Bonn, Germany, where she graduated in 1997. Her Ph.-D. in the field of ceramic moulds for liquid metal casting was earned in 2001 from the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen, Germany. She then worked for Siemens Energy in charge of ceramic shields for stationary gas turbines and transferred to Berlin in 2008 where she conducted scientific research on the oxidation of high temperature materials and corrosion behavior of steels used in Carbon Capture Techniques. 2009 she became full professor at the Applied University Berlin, HTW where she currently teaches material science for engineering students. Anja Pfennigs research interest and expertise is in the field of corrosion and corrosion fatigue of materials at high temperature and high pressure simulating geothermal environments. Here she involves students in practical project based lectures. For 6 years her teaching and teaching related research focusses on matters concerning first year students. Diversity, motivation, duration and step-by-step success are important when designing a new course. Inverted classroom scenarios, blended learning concepts, online courses and alternative grading are important research topics with regard to practical and theoretical study results and development of self-confident young engineers. Anja Pfennig successfully produces lecture videos using the peer-to-peer approach and implements these in her first year courses as study source in inverted classroom scenarios. The impact of lecture films on study behavior, continuity and study results is her main interest as lecturer and researcher.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Kuan-Chou Chen, Purdue University Northwest, USA
Kuan-Chou Chen is the Associate Dean for Graduate Program and Research, Thomas M. McDermott Sr. Endowed Chair, Professor in Economic Development, Professor of Management Information Systems. He was the Department Head of Information Systems, Finance, and Business Analytics (2005-2016), as well as Interim Department Head of Department of Graduate Studies in Education (2013-2014) at Purdue University Northwest. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University and his MBA from National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan. He specialized in computer programming, system simulation, project management, decision support systems, data mining, system analysis and design, e-business strategy and application, supply chain management, network design and security, knowledge management, and information economy. Professor Chen has more than 90 scholarly publications, most in peer-reviewed journals. He is an active participant in several professional journals and serves on three paper reviewer boards. Currently he is an Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning. His productivity and scholarship have been recognized by his colleagues, being nominated three years in a row for an “Outstanding Scholar Award.” He also the recipient of Teacher of the Year Award (Purdue University Northwest, 2005).