Christoph Meinel

• Professor Dr. sc. nat. Dr. rer. nat
• Founding President - former Head of the Hasso Plattner Institute at German University of Digital Science

What the registered mail with return receipt is for the letter writer, is the TCP protocol on the internet. It ensures that the shipment does not get lost.

For us users, it appears as if all computers easily understand each other on the internet. In fact, this is only possible thanks to sophisticated encapsulation programs: the internetworking.

The Internet probably owes its success to the fact that no one is at the levers of power. The Internet is shaped by a whole range of international organizations.

Basically, a WLAN is a LAN without cables. But the devil is in the detail. How to prevent that everyone talks at the same time and no one can listen anymore?

For smooth streaming, more than just a fast internet connection is needed. Only further key innovations make the ubiquity of online videos possible.

Humans understand website names, computers understand IP addresses. Fortunately, there is a translator.

A fundamentally new world has opened up to us by the latest technological developments. But how to shape this new world depends on us.

For every web address, the appropriate IP address must be found. This is a huge effort – good thing the load can be distributed across many shoulders.

In order for texts, images, or videos to enter the digital world, it requires a translation with the right encoding—ideally without the user noticing anything.

The astonishing thing: The standards of the Internet developed without a set plan and supervision. Yet it works. How is that possible?

Only with HTTP, the web would not be a user-friendly space that much is certain. Cookies help with a smooth web experience, but it also requires digital basic hygiene.

“Today not just phones are “smart”. Digitally interconnected machines further drive the transformation our world”.

There are tens of billions of computers connected to the internet, each with its own address. The sophisticated method that kept track has since become a victim of its success.

With the new internet standard, frugality is passé: Thanks to IPv6 there are addresses galore. However, these are significantly more complex.

Users hardly notice anything of the underlying protocols and description languages. Yet they are the foundations of the Web.

Sending emails is one of the first applications on the internet. Only thanks to new standards and protocols, we can use them so conveniently and diversely.

Acoustic sounds are merely pressure variations in the air. They must be translated into binary coding before computers can to deal with them.

TCP guarantees error free transport of information over the Internet. But TCP does much more: It prevents our internet from getting stuck in a permanent traffic jam.

Search engines guide us through the vast web cosmos. They find exactly what we are looking for in a matter of seconds. Without them, we would be hopelessly lost on the web.

A web that understands its content will be the next major development step of the WWW. There are already approaches how to achieve this.

Simply interconnecting LANs does not result in a uniform network. It requires a lot of networking technology to let the interconnected lans look like the one big internet.

When using the web, we leave data traces everywhere, which diligent data collectors register and pass on. It’s bad when this happens behind the users’ backs.

From Cookies to Caching—only thanks to numerous key innovations did the WWW become the killer app of the internet.

Hardly any computer stands alone anymore. How is it possible to connect thousands of company computers into one large network? The LAN technology makes it possible.

Every day, hundreds of billions of emails are sent over the internet. But what happens behind the scenes when you press the “send”-button?

On today’s internet, data is transported on a gigantic scale. Fortunately, depots can be set up at strategic points: Caches prevent unnecessary data movements.

Web services create the basis for machines to find and interconnect with each other over the network.

In the beginning, the web was a one-way street, but then suddenly there was oncoming traffic. How does it work that everyone can participate?

With more IP addresses than there are stars in the universe, the internet finally has the space it needs to unfold. But the departure into the endless expanses is still hesitant.

Sockets and ports connect applications on computers on the internet, similar to ports in the analog world, which ensure that goods are loaded and transported in a targeted manner.

The internet´s development started in 1969, the year of the moon landing. Quite appropriate: In both cases, humanity left the old world behind.

In the analog world, there are infinite forms, colors, and shapes. In the digital world, there are only zeros and ones. How can those concepts be aligned?

A video is nothing more than a huge sequence of interconnected images. To transmit them on the Internet, it requires compressions to reduce the amounts of data to a manageable size.

Thanks to TCP/IP, the internet works. But how can applications use it to its full advantage? Another crucial element needs to be in place.

As far as the internet is concerned, we are still in a very early stage: in a world full of mysteries, myths, and surprises. It’s time to change that.

“Wide Area Networks” consist of millions of distributed network nodes. But there is no accurate map of their structure. How does the information still reach its destination?

To ensure right functioning of the Internet, the internet works in layers: cleverly constructed common standards regulate everything.

Vision of a University of the Digital Tomorrow - The German University of Digital Science

Integrating interactive videos into Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has been suggested as a way to boost student engagement, particularly in understanding complex subjects like artificial intelligence (AI). This study examines how interactive videos affect student engagement in AI-related MOOCs offered on the KI-Campus platform. By examining da...

Customer centricity is widely regarded as a fundamental business strategy that fosters strong relationships and long-term loyalty. However, when taken to extremes, customer-centric approaches can lead to operational inefficiencies, employee burnout, and strategic misalignment. This paper explores the potential pitfalls of customer-centric chaos, id...

Automatically assessing code for learning purposes presents a significant challenge in educational contexts, particularly in online courses aimed at distance learning. With a large public and limited teaching staff, the need for automated ways to grade learners’ programs becomes paramount for scalability and effective management. Python's simplicit...

Phishing is among the most common attack vectors against organizations, institutions, and individuals. However, previous research on phishing susceptibility has almost always been performed in profes- sional or academic contexts, thus rendering the target domain of private persons understudied. We explore this gap in research by conducting a large-...

In the evolving landscape of educational technology, integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into educational assessment creation has emerged as a key area of innovation. This paper compares three methods for generating Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs): (1) without the use of generative AI, (2) with unguided usage of ChatGPT, and (3) with a specia...

This is a vision of a university student can study completely digital, which is implemented by the German University of Digital Science.

In the report innovative formats for online teaching are described which are used in the German University of Digital Science, the first digital university in Germany.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a popular form of online education that often attracts a huge and heterogeneous group of learners with diverse interests and backgrounds. However, most MOOCs follow a one-size-fits-all approach, providing a fixed order of learning materials and expecting all learners to follow this recommended path. Thus, the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed the landscape of higher education globally, with a pronounced impact on university students in Arab countries. This study investigates the impact of the pandemic on university students' learning experiences, focusing on the transition to online learning modalities. Through a comprehensive survey distr...

Online education has become an integral part of everyday life. As one form of online education, traditional Massive Open Online Courses mostly rely on video-based learning materials. To enhance accessibility and provide more variety of the learning content, we studied how podcasts can be integrated into online courses. Throughout three studies, we...

Previous studies have shown that demonstrations can significantly help Large Language Models (LLMs ) perform better on the given tasks. However, this so-called In-Context Learning ( ICL ) ability is very sensitive to the presenting context, and often dozens of demonstrations are needed. In this work, we investigate if we can reduce the shot number...

In the context of programming education, so-called auto-graders allow learners to receive automated feedback on their submissions. Because assessing learners' code usually involves executing the learners' untrusted code, this commonly used mechanism poses a significant security risk for those systems. Since auto-graders are mostly employed in the c...

Phishing is still one of the prevalent threats targeting private persons and organizations. Current teaching best practices often advocate cue-based investigation methods. Previous research primarily confronted participants with phishing emails showing such indicators to assess the success of different education measures. Our large-scale mixed-meth...

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized our comprehension of intelligence bringing us closer to Artificial Intelligence. Since their introduction, researchers have actively explored the applications of LLMs across diverse fields, significantly elevating capabilities. Cybersecurity, traditionally resistant to data-driven solution...

Online education has become an integral part of everyday life. As one form of online education, traditional Massive Open Online Courses mostly rely on video-based learning materials. To enhance accessibility and provide more variety of the learning content, we studied how podcasts can be integrated into online courses. Throughout three studies, we...

From June 14 to June 16, 2023, Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, hosted the eighth European MOOC Stakeholder Summit (EMOOCs 2023). The pandemic is fortunately over. It has once again shown how important digital education is. How well-prepared a country was could be seen in our schools, universities, and companies. In different countries, the probl...

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has made computer science more accessible by offering courses on various programming languages and technologies to anyone with an internet connection. These MOOCs have demonstrated that providing learners with the necessary tools for self-regulated learning and formative feedback remains crucial...

Phishing is among the most common attack vectors against organizations, institutions, and individuals. However, previous research on phishing susceptibility is almost always performed in professional or academic contexts, thus rendering the target domain of private persons understudied. We explore this gap in research by conducting a large-scale...

Phishing is still one of the prevalent threats targeting private persons and organizations alike. Current teaching best practices often advocate cue-based investigation methods. In our large-scale mixed-methodology study, we evaluated the phishing performance of 4,729 participants across four phishing emails and surveyed them on their behavior and...

Programming courses offered by openHPI, the European MOOC platform of the Hasso Plattner Institute, feature hands-on programming exercises to support learners in practicing the newly acquired skills. These exercises are facilitated by two tools: CodeOcean and OpenJupyter. CodeOcean is user-friendly and suitable for beginners, while OpenJupyter is m...

Die fortschreitende Digitalisierung der Schulen macht es möglich, die Lerndaten der Schülerinnen und Schüler in einer zentralen Cloud zu speichern. Die Befürworter versprechen sich davon eine bessere individuelle Förderung und fordern eine bundesweite Lösung, um möglichst viele Daten auswerten zu können. Die Gegner befürchten eine automatisierte St...