ulno.net ulno – You will know.
Ulrich Norbisrath with IoT gear and AR glasses
Going XR. — Ulno with IoT gear and AR glasses.

ulno – You will know.

I build and teach the Internet of Things, edge computing, and digital sovereignty — so that people and institutions can own their data, their devices, and their future instead of renting it from someone else.

I am a Professor for Distributed and Edge Computing at HSBI (Hochschule Bielefeld, Campus Gütersloh), the creator of the open-source IoTempower framework for teaching and building IoT, and a co-founder of the IoTempire community. My work lives where open-source software, hands-on hardware tinkering, and project-based teaching meet.

▶ Watch IoTempower in 2 minutes: video.iotempower.us — the show card for the framework, made for teaching.

What I work on

  • Edge & Cloud Computing – small, local, resilient systems that push computation close to where the data is created.
  • Internet of Things – designing and teaching IoT with IoTempower, an education-first, privacy-respecting framework (GitHub).
  • Digital Sovereignty – self-hosted alternatives to Big Tech, on-premise AI, and giving hardware a second life: repurposing old smartphones into tiny edge data centers instead of e-waste, and building up community spaces like the Tartu Hackerspace.
  • Extended Reality (XR) – VR/AR work environments, teleoperation, and digital twins.
  • Project- and challenge-based teaching – learning by building, with stories and real problems as the driving force.
  • Open communities – growing IoTempire, an open association of makers, educators, researchers, and institutions around a sustainable, sensible IoT.

Start here

Bio

Academic and personal background, research focus, and the short version of a long road.

Teaching

Courses, workshops, and open educational material — with live links to the class repos.

IoTempower

The open-source IoT & edge framework (source on GitHub; site at iotempower.us).

Teaching material

Workbooks, courses, and workshops — all in the open.

IoTempire

An open association building a sustainable, sensible, and interoperable IoT community.

Publications

Peer-reviewed research, always up to date, on Google Scholar.

Code

My personal repositories on GitHub — the IoTempire org is at github.com/iotempire.

Find me

Off the clock

Away from the terminal you will find me chasing the perfect espresso or pour-over, baking bread, and enjoying good German cake. My bread machine gave up years ago, and the lazy bread I started making instead has been requested far more often than anything I have ever written about software. If you are a student or a colleague with an idea to brainstorm, that is usually the best place to start the conversation — bring curiosity, I will bring the coffee (and probably cake).

There is a small fun & curiosities corner for the rest of it: recipes, maker experiments, and a game I wrote long ago.

And if you have a few minutes for my time as a YouTuber, here is a video I still like from my YouTube channel @ulnonet.