CHAIR OF

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

EVOK was presented for the second time last week at the Behördenspiegel symposium on new police technologies. The focus was on the problem, the solution approach, the procedure and the initial results. We also discussed the advantages of research projects with public authorities, as there are too few research projects in Germany in which the police can be involved throughout the entire process. At the symposium, interested parties were able to meet and make new contacts - there was a lively exchange.

The new Mittelstand-Digital Zentrum Magdeburg will open in the Experimental Factory on August 1, 2022. The funding of 5.5 million euros is being provided by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection. 

The new center will benefit from the experience of the Mittelstand 4.0 Kompetenzzentrum Magdeburg, which expires on 31.07.2022.The new funding phase begins on 01.08.2022 and will initially last three years.Five partners from science and practice are pooling their digitalization expertise to support small and medium-sized enterprises and craft businesses in Saxony-Anhalt in their digital transformation. The free and practice-oriented formats cover a broad spectrum, from getting started with the topic of digitalization to further training and the implementation of concrete solutions.

Further information can be found here or on the project website.

As part of our scientific team project "Creativity techniques in agile software development", a team of students developed a prototype for low-CO2 travel planning together with the Saxony-Anhalt Tourism Association.

This project was developed as part of the Mittelstand 4.0-Kompetenzzentrum Magdeburg project. More information on the scientific team project and its results can be found on the project website and on the uni:magazin page.

The EVOK team reports back from the GPEC after a three-day exhibition and brings back many exciting impressions and interesting contacts.
With the great feedback we received and a strengthened feeling, we are now setting out with renewed focus on research and driving the project further towards completion and commercialization.

This year, the EVOK research project is taking part in the international trade fair: GPEC General Police Equipment Exhibition & Conference. EVOK will be presented there as part of the stand of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. This offers a good opportunity to publicize the project and prepare for possible exploitation. The team is already looking forward to the experience and is looking forward to the feedback that the trade fair will bring.

Our article "Annotron: Semi-automatic Acquisition of Datasets for Retail Recognition" by Marco Filax, Tim Gonschorek and Frank Ortmeier has been accepted for publication.

The paper proposes an approach to reduce the manual annotation effort of labelers by reducing the time spent on repetitive, error-prone tasks. We evaluate the approach in the retail recognition domain, a fine-grained domain, which means that instance-level annotations are costly due to the density of products on the shelves. We refine an existing retrial product dataset and outperform the number of stock keeping units found previously. We labeled over 446,500 individual bounding boxes from 1188 different SKUs.

The CSE is participating in the BMWK-funded joint project SafeTrAIn together with Siemens, Fraunhofer, Edge Case Research, Merantix Labs, Bit Technology Solutions and many other partners in researching methods for safeguarding artificial intelligence for fully autonomous rail transport.

We are looking forward to this exciting project and the collaboration!

In recent months, members of the Chair of Software Engineering have been honored.

Prof. Frank Ortmeier's spin-off bridgefield GmbH has been awarded the "KfW Entrepreneurs' Prize 2021" for the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt for the topic "KI für statt gegen den Menschen" ("AI for instead of against humans“). The award ceremony by KfW Bank took place on October 28, 2021 in Berlin together with the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Peter Altmeier. There will be a further audience award from all the state winners, which you can vote for on this website.

In addition, Leon Wehmeier, research assistant at the Chair of Software Engineering, was honored by the Faculty of Computer Science as the best graduate in the Computer Systems in Engineering Master's program.

We congratulate both of them on their achievements and awards!