ulno.net ulno – You will know.

Ulrich Norbisrath (ulno)

ULrich NOrbisrath — read the capitals and you get ULNO. “ulno – You will know.” · ulno.net

Professor for Distributed and Edge Computing at HSBI, Campus Gütersloh (since 2026).

  • Educator · Consultant · Mentor
  • Researcher · Inventor · Maker · Artist
  • YouTuber → youtube.ulno.net
  • Globalist — lived, taught, and researched in Estonia · USA · Germany · Austria · Kazakhstan · Singapore · Indonesia · Brazil
  • Research: Internet of Things · Edge & Cloud Computing · VR/AR & Digital Twins · Software Craftsmanship · Education & Creativity
  • PhD: Home Automation (RWTH Aachen)
▶ Video business card: a two-minute look at teaching the IoTempower way — video.iotempower.us.

Auf Deutsch →

Teaching — hands-on, challenge- and project-based

  • Learning by building. Students start from a story or a real-world challenge and work toward a working prototype — there is no split between lecture and lab, and it is hands-on from day one.
  • Active learning. Flipped classroom, peer review, storytelling and story-driven development, design thinking, jigsaw. What others call failure, I prefer to call exploration — ideas that don’t pan out are learning outcomes too.
  • Open and reproducible. All material is open source (IoTempower + iotempire-teaching); every team gets an affordable kit and runs its own network — no dependency on cloud or university infrastructure.
  • Assessment as feedback. Portfolios, peer and self-assessment, a growth mindset.
  • Inclusive by design. Programs for women in STEM, accessibility, and students and stakeholders from Africa, Central and South Asia, and South America.
  • 20 years of teaching across eight countries, with 5 PhD students and 60+ master’s and bachelor’s theses supervised.

Digital sovereignty & agency

  • Owning your stack. Self-hosted alternatives to Big-Tech cloud and services (this website is one), privacy and security by design, and on-premise AI solutions.
  • Sustainable computing. Repurposing old smartphones into tiny edge data centres instead of e-waste — turning yesterday’s devices into local infrastructure (with colleagues at the University of Tartu).
  • Community. Co-building and steering the Tartu Hackerspace for making and digital agency.
  • Open hardware & software. Creator and maintainer of IoTempower; first ambassador of Brazil’s open-hardware Caninos Loucos initiative.
  • Work supported by grants, among them the XRP Ledger Foundation (XRPLF — now the Inclusive Financial Technology Foundation, INFTF).

Selected publications & recognition

  • Supporting Sustainable Computing by Repurposing E-Waste Smartphones as Tiny Data Centers — IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2025.
  • Putting the S back into IoT: Tutorial on Sensor and Actor Systems in Small Portable Ad-Hoc Networks — invited tutorial, DEBS 2024, Lyon.
  • ENLIGHT Teaching & Learning Award 2024 — the IoT course was the University of Tartu’s nominated entry at the ENLIGHT Teaching & Learning Conference in Tartu (course profile; the video business card was part of the submission).
  • IoT Educational Framework Case Study: Devices as Things for Hands-on Collaboration — Journal of Engineering Education Transformations, 2024.

What I bring: project- and challenge-based teaching that puts hardware in students’ hands early, applied research with regional and international partners, and a clear commitment to digital sovereignty, openness, and practical transfer.