Comenius Fellowship Daniel Feitosa & Brian Setz and one for Kailai Li

Nine lecturers from the University of Groningen have been awarded a Comenius Fellowship. Two projects from the Bernoulli Insittute.

The Comenius programme plays a vital role in the renewal of higher education in the Netherlands. The grant enables lecturers to put their innovative ideas into practice right away in their teaching.

• Dr Daniel Feitosa & Dr Brian Setz (FSE): A Students-First Approach to Developing AI-based Systems.

• Dr Kailai Li (FSE): Fostering High-Tech Intellectual Resources Beyond State of the Art: A Pilot of Research-Oriented Education in Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems. (see below).

Dr. Daniel Feitosa and Dr. Brian Setz have received a EUR 50,000 Comenius Teaching Fellow grant from the NRO for their project: "A Students-First Approach to Developing AI-based Systems."

Traditional AI assistants like ChatGPT often provide generic responses that ignore carefully curated course materials. This project creates an AI learning assistant using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)—a technology that combines large language models with specific course content like textbooks and lecture notes. When students ask questions, the system searches through actual course materials first, then generates more precise, course-appropriate responses, which can be further validated and refined by the course instructors.

But students don't just use this AI assistant—they interact with its development. The goal of this project is to build a real-world AI-enabled system to serve as a living lab for course assignments. The Digital Lab team will develop and be responsible for maintaining the system (as an open-source project). Students of the course Advanced Programming will work on parts of the system during their assignments.

This setting allows students to learn about AI-enabled development in a practical context, and their contributions may directly improve the system. They will gain hands-on experience with real-world AI development while addressing a genuine educational need, also getting acquainted with reasoning about trustworthy AI systems themselves

Fostering High-Tech Intellectual Resources Beyond State of the Art: A Pilot of Research-Oriented Education in Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems
dr. K. Li, BI

This project is a content-based educational innovation driven by his team's application-oriented research in mobile robotics and embodied AI. Intelligent cyber-physical systems are advancing various applications, such as autonomous driving, digital healthcare, and service robots. This growing momentum has intensified the demand for intellectual resources to fuel technological innovations within the Dutch high-tech industry and society, particularly in the northern Netherlands. Addressing this demand calls for higher education to adopt innovative strategies that cultivate graduates with advanced mindset, deep knowledge, and hands-on experience beyond traditional STEM curricula. As researchers in embodied AI, dr. Li and his team are committed to bringing their real-world expertise and skills into the classroom to sustainably empower the next generation of high-tech innovators.

The project is closely integrated with the new mobile robotics courses dr. K. Li has developed (https://www.rug.nl/staff/kailai.li/teaching) within the MSc CS programme (AI Engineering track) at BI, as well as BSc/MSc student projects. The project benefits from the strong support of the School of Science and Engineering through director drs. B.J. Kooistra-Akse and Prof. M. Cao within FSE.