For the third time in a row, an iPraktikum team got first place in the category "best student achievement" ("Beste studentische Leistung") at the SmartHome Deutschland Award 2019: with the industry partner iHaus, they developed the CityJuice system during the winter term 2018/19.

A common problem in neighborhoods with an increasing number of electric cars is the price for a charging station and a lack of possibilities to charge. Additionally, the distribution of energy may become a problem when every car owner operates a charging station. The team of ten students developed the iHaus CityJuice system that aims to solve these problems by providing charging station owners with a simple and intuitive way to share free capacities and car owners with a way to find available charging slots. An intelligent component decides, when and for how long a car can be loaded to guarantee a hassle-free transition to the next loading process. In the future, the system may automatically instruct the electric cars to drive to the next available charger and control the charger. CityJuice promotes this vision by providing an autonomous component that can communicate with cars and send instructions for the charging process.

As part of an event in the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin on May 29, 2019, the students presented the project and received the award for the first place. The SmartHome Deutschland initiative represents a trade-spanning, interdisciplinary communication platform to enable information exchange between regional smart home organizations and representatives of research, development, industry, commerce, and craft.

                                             Delivery of Video recording equipment to NIMR in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Africa

From April 15th to 18th, 2019 Ruth Demmel from the Chair for Applied Software Engineering and Andreas Jung from the Multimediagroup RBG at the Department of Computer Science TUM, travelled to the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania with the brand-new equipment to build up a full recording studio. The aim was to teach how to set up a mobile recording environment, record video lectures and slides for a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with topics from Health Sciences in the context of the CYSTINET (https://www.cysti.net) project.

You can find more fotos and information at CYSTINET

We will offer a Ferienakademie course about the topic of Autonomous Drones for Sustainability during the Ferienakademie 2019. The Ferienakademie will take place from September 22, 2019, until October 4, 2019, in the Sarntal Valley, South Tyrol, Italy.

In this course, we are going to build a prototype for an autonomous drone-based water quality management system. We will use the Sarntal water reservoir next to our hotel to collect water samples. The samples should be collected every day and flown back to the laboratory based at our hotel. The developed system will be deployed to control the water quality of Lake Nokoué, in Benin, West Africa, which regularly suffers from water pollution. We will address the following topics: Green Hydrogen, Solar Energy, Battery Types, Autonomous drone flight, Search algorithms for drone fleets, Software patterns for drones, Drone fleet coordination, Scooping Mechanism for water sampling, and Geographic Information System data.

Find out more on our project site and apply here: ferienakademie.de

We will teach three large courses in summer 2019: Introduction to Software Engineering (EIST) has a focus on software development with exercises on analysis, design, modeling, programming, and testing. Project Organization and Management (POM) introduces students to agile methods, meeting management, configuration management, release management, continuous integration and continuous delivery. Software Engineering Essentials (SEECx) teaches the essentials of applied software engineering including UML, patterns, and project management techniques for managing the development of complex software systems.

All three courses put special emphasis on blended and experiential learning: mixing theory with exercises. We expect more than 1900 students in EIST and more than 500 students in POM. Therefore, we are looking for motivated tutors who help us in the preparation and conduction of exercises. Tutors can participate with a HiWi contract, or as part of a Seminar /  Praktikum.

If you are interested, please fill out the Application Form with your motivation, CV and transcript of records until February 28 (2nd round).

On Saturday, October 13th, we took part of the TUM Open House Day (Tag der offenen Tür). There, Constantin Costescu, a master student's at our chair, presented his thesis project. In order to show the advances and possibilities in the autonomous driving sector, we had two different toy cars compete against each other. One driven by kids attending the event, and one in self-driving mode. The self-driving car was equipped with a Raspberry Pi, which used a camera and a neural network to detect the lanes, and steer the wheels in the correct direction. 

To celebrate the World Emoji Day last Tuesday, July 17, 2018, Siemens published an article on the future of manufacturing and the use of emojis in the industrial world on its "Pictures of the Future" website. The article refers to the project, SIEMojis, which was implemented in the course of the iPraktikum in the winter semester 2018.

Jochen Nickles, the customer of the Siemens team, is quoted in the article: "Our prototype offers a highly promising means of bringing man and machine closer together."

We are pleased that the results of an iPraktikum have made it to the innovation pages of Siemens. We show that real problems are being worked on in the course of the iPraktikum and that innovations are being driven in the participating companies.

We would like to thank the whole SIEMojis team around project leader Andreas Seitz and coach Marija Jovanović. Thanks to Alina Usova, Anil Karatas, Dmitrii Petukhov, Florian Bodlée, Fridolin Koch and Mykola Vankovych.

The Siemens IOT team has successfully won the worldwide Siemens Global University Challenge. With the idea of the IIoT Bazaar, the team around project leader Andreas Seitz and coach Phillip Diller was able to prevail against a multitude of other ideas. The prize is an invitation to a 1-week hackathon at Siemens in Nuremberg. Three of the 10 participants of the iPraktikum will be invited and get the chance to further develop the prototype and get expert feedback. Besides the invitation to Nuremberg, the Challenge is endowed with 1000€.

Details about the idea of the IIoT Bazaar can be found on the pages of the Global University Challenge.

We are delighted that Siemens is setting up such a challenge and opportunity and that we can present and refine our ideas there.

Thanks to the whole Siemens IOT team who made the application possible with a lot of effort and time. Thanks to Moritz Kellermann, Deeksha Sinha, Phuong Mai Mai, Illia Ovchynnikov, Maksym 'Max' Hrinenko, Tim Lewandowski, Ali Abbas Jaffri and Alina Turbina 

Dr. Stephan Krusche received the Teaching Award for the Best Education in Summer 2017 for the course Project-Organization and Management. The award was granted on June 21, 2018 by the student council (Fachschaft MPI) at the summer party of the Informatics faculty for exceptional performances in education. 

The large course Project-Organization and Management is offered to more than 400 students and includes interactive elements such as quizzes, guided tutorials and programming and modeling exercises where students receive immediate feedback. Students apply the learned project management techniques in team exercises where they develop small mobile apps. The positive feedback of the students about the course and the Teaching Award show that including interactive learning is also possible in large lecture based courses.