The Software Campus Summit finally took place again on site on May 19 and 20 after a long break of more than two years. DATEV as one of the industry partners of the program sponsored the event and invited to the IT Campus in Nuremberg. There, nearly 120 visitors came together: Program participants, alumni*ae, partners of the program as well as representatives of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the DLR Project Management Agency.
IT research projects in the Science Slam
For the second time, participants presented their research projects implemented at the Software Campus in a Science Slam. Program manager Stefan Jazdzejewski and Stefan Melles (technology strategy and management as well as operational contact person for the Software Campus at DATEV) kicked off the slam with a presentation about the Software Campus and its plans for the future. Afterwards, the participants presented their project in the form of a 5-minute popular science contribution. The audience selected Stefan Röhrl’s (TU Munich) contribution on his project CellPhaser, an intuitive machine learning solution for the analysis of holographic cell images, as the best contribution by applause. DATEV awarded him with a Jochen Schweizer voucher in the amount of 600 euros.
32 researchers exchanged information about their IT research projects with the event visitors in a poster and demo session. Summit participants were able to actively support Lara Marie Reimer in her series of experiments for the MoMoTrack project. She is researching multimodal sensor data from mobile devices in the context of prevention, therapy support and rehabilitation of neurological diseases. On a six-meter running track, the participants’ movements were recorded via sensors and cameras.
Leadership is elementary for transformation
“The future is created through a permanent commitment to transformation”. With this statement, Swen Rehders (NTT DATA) opened the panel on the topic of innovation culture and transformation. In this panel, leading managers from research (Fraunhofer IIS) and a wide variety of companies (DATEV, TRUMPF, NTT DATA) shared their perspectives and impulses on how companies could be made more fit for the future. They encouraged the Software Campus participants to use their role as future leaders to break through old structures and processes and make companies sustainable and dynamic.
For 13 of them, the summit marked their farewell from the Software Campus, and Prof. Antonio Krüger (Managing Director of DFKI) awarded them their graduation certificates. Dr. Jonas Traub, chairman of the alumni association, gave tips and shared experiences on how the network built up in the program can have a lasting effect. With this inspiration, the Summit visitors started the final networking session, in which the industry and research partners in particular provided information about career options.
© Matthias Merz
