Like the year before the Association of German Engineers (VDI) called for participation of engineering students from Berlin an Brandenburg on challenge Mensch und Technik (people and technology). Until 30 September 2016 teams of up to three students could hand in a poster and a brief description of a project having a strong connection to both people and technology.

Mid November VDI announced that our team is invited to the award ceremony – yeah! On 25 November the award ceremony took place at Ludwig Erhard Haus near Berlin Zoologischer Garten.

Team Sentient Light and prof. Hausburg

At the beginning of the event the most successful graduates of technical classes in Berlin and Brandenburg were honored. Speakers of the VDI emphasized the challenges to address and solve challenges of the modern and connected city. Presindet of Technische Hochschule Brandenburg (University of Applied Sciences) – Prof. Dr. Wieneke-Toutaoui – also outlined today’s possibilities as an engineering stundent to make the world a better place. In this context she also mentioned the increased but nonetheless low amount of female students in engineering.

Other speakers appealed to the students’ entrepreneurial spirit. One quote by Reid Hoffman stayed in memory

„If you are not embarassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched to late.“

– Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

After that the top three award-winning teams were announced. At this point we did not yet not know which place we would be.

In reverse order the teams were asked to come on stage: third place went to a team of two students who made use of an Aldebaran Nao robot in order to translate spoken language into sign language. The second price went to one student who developed a technique to reduce airplane noise by using liners.

And the winner is…

Sentient Light could convince the jury and was awarded with the first price. None of us expected this kind of success. Even more we are all happy receiving this appreciation for our work.

In a brief speech Prof. Hausburg summed up the project as the integration of a technical solution in a social environment which directly reflects people’s dynamics and interactions.

Finally all the three teams had the opportunity to present their concepts and posters in details and were able to answer questions. The increased interest in our project motivated us to present the different aspects in more detail. Part one: the project vision.