Shortly before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, November 8th, 2023, a queue formed in front of the former Karstadthaus B on Königsstrasse in Lübeck. Students and their teachers waited for the Lübeck AI experience day to finally start. Over 500 interested students and citizens found out about the latest research projects at 20 stands from TH Lübeck, the University of Lübeck, Fraunhofer IMTE and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and were able to try out various AI demonstrators themselves.
AI you can touch
Visitors were able to find out more about the AI projects of the CoSA competence center. In addition to the “AI nose”, the PRECISE project also caused astonished faces. In the project, experts from the CoSA competence center under the leadership of Prof. Horst Hellbrück, together with SDU Sønderborg, Fraunhofer ISIT and AmiNIC ApS, are developing a hand sensor for real-time measurement of the freshness of meat and fish products. (Insert the Sat 1 link for LinkedIn and news here)
Directly opposite, those interested could read about the projects of the Immersive Media Laboratory by Prof. Isabella Beyer and Daniel Sacristán. In the project “Collaborative Research Center 1461 “Neuroelectronics: Biologically Inspired Information Processing” they are, for example, visualizing muscle activity and the location of neurons in various animals using virtual reality applications.
AI pitched
At the almost traditional Night of AI, which is held by the Artificial Intelligence in Applications (KIA) specialist group at the TH Lübeck in cooperation with the AI Transfer Hub SH and the IHK Lübeck, company representatives, students, university employees and AI experts met. Interested people meet in the building forum.
Moderated by Prof. André Drews, they presented their business area and research in the field of artificial intelligence in 5-minute pitches on Thursday, November 9th. Outside of the talk sessions, the participants exchanged ideas with each other over snacks and drinks, networked and saw practical examples from demonstrators of what the possible uses and application of AI could look like.
First Hanseatic Hackathon
The finale of the KI 2023 week took place again in the TH Lübeck construction forum. After the welcome by Vice Presidents Frank Schwartze of the TH Lübeck and Stefan Fischer of the University of Lübeck, Julia Carstens, State Secretary in the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Transport, Labor, Technology and Tourism, opened the Hanseatic Hackathon on Friday, November 10th. Under the motto “A Race of Innovations”, eight interdisciplinary teams at the Hanse Innovation Campus Lübeck worked on solutions to real challenges facing the economy in Lübeck and the Hansebelt region.
What’s special about the Hanseatic Hackathon: It wasn’t just IT experts, students and scientists who met. Company representatives also contributed themselves and their perspectives on problems to the processing of their submitted “cases”. The hackathon participants were challenged to find solutions for the processing, translation and simplification of language and writing into user-friendly and data-supported applications or solutions for individual systems with the help of Large language models work.
“The Hanseatic Hackathon gives us a great opportunity to apply cutting-edge technologies to everyday challenges outside of everyday business. It also offers the opportunity to network with other companies from the Lübeck area, AI experts from universities and students,” says André Gode, who took part in the hackathon for MACH AG.
“Worklabs” complemented the event on Friday and Saturday and gave participants and interested visitors insights. For example, the new professor of AI and education, Dr. Sebastian Hobert shares his knowledge of programming chatbots, while the new professor of AI and data science, Dr. Niklas Reuter explained about “Promt Engineering Sprint”. A team from TH Lübeck led by Prof. Nane Kratzke provided professional and technical support for the hackathon.
The hackathon was realized by a diverse alliance of institutions on the Lübeck campus: the Lübeck University of Technology, the University of Lübeck, the GründerCube and AI.STARTUP.HUB and received equal support from the foodRegio. The Hanseatic Hackathon is part of the HI Lübeck joint project on the Hanse Innovation Campus Lübeck. It is funded by the BMBF Innovative University program. More information: www.hic-luebeck.de/hi