On Monday, 13 January 2025, Prof. Dr. Anni-Yasmin Turhan (Knowledge Representation) and Prof. Dr. Lena Wessel (Didactics of Mathematics) gave their inaugural lectures in lecture hall O2. The dean of the faculty, Prof Dr Jürgen Klüners, welcomed both professors and the audience at the beginning of the event.
Professor Anni-Yasmin Turhan, who was appointed to Paderborn University in 2024 for the research area of knowledge representation, kicked things off. Professor Turhan studied at the University of Hamburg and completed her doctorate and habilitation at the Technical University of Dresden. Her academic stops included the RWTH Aachen and the University of Oxford.
In her presentation entitled "Reasoning in Description Logics in Presence of Imperfect Data", she addressed the challenges and advances in the field of robust logical reasoning - especially in dealing with incomplete or contradictory data. She presented various approaches for drawing meaningful conclusions from such information and emphasised the importance of complexity analysis for the development of efficient algorithms. She first explained description logics (DL) as a family of well-studied formal ontology languages with clear semantics. These form the basis for various semantic technologies used in data science. DLs have been studied for a variety of logical reasoning problems. Starting from an ontology and data, the reasoning component merely extracts implicit knowledge from the given and thus makes it accessible for further processing. Depending on the expressiveness of the logic, the inference problems for DLs behave differently in terms of their complexity. The results of the complexity analyses for the various combinations of DLs, data and query types are contributions to the field of symbolic AI using methods of theoretical computer science. These results form the "complexity landscape" of the combinations and thus tell us for which of these combinations efficient algorithms can be found at all. In her presentation, Prof Turhan gave an overview of her recent results on reasoning in DLs and focused on different approaches for "robust" reasoning for DLs that enable "meaningful" reasoning even with imperfect or even inconsistent information.
The second part of the inaugural lecture was given by Professor Lena Wessel. She studied mathematics and English at TU Dortmund University to become a teacher at grammar schools and comprehensive schools before working as a research assistant at the Institute for Development and Research in Mathematics Education in the Faculty of Mathematics at TU Dortmund University. Following a traineeship in 2013, she worked as an academic counsellor and junior professor in Freiburg. Since October 2020, she has been a professor in the Department of Mathematics Education at Paderborn University.
In her lecture on the topic of "Integrated thinking of development research at teaching and training level: insights into promoting understanding using the example of analytical geometry", Prof Dr Wessel presented theoretical and empirical results on promoting understanding in analytical geometry. She showed how didactic development research can contribute to the design of effective teaching materials and teaching-learning processes. Special attention is paid to the potential of subject didactic development research to promote the integration of teaching and further education in an innovative way. Innovations at teaching and training level are particularly urgent against the background of current educational developments. In particular, maths content at the end of lower secondary level, in upper secondary level and at transition should be addressed here alongside cross-cutting topics such as language education and digitalisation. Due to this urgency, approaches from subject didactic development research are particularly suitable for addressing the corresponding desiderata at product level (teaching and training materials) and process level (teaching-learning processes) in an integrated manner. Initial theoretical and empirical results were presented using the example of selected concepts of analytical geometry.
