Expedition to the ICPS Research Institute at Heilbronn University

The next connect.IT expedition takes us to the renowned Institute for Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) at Heilbronn University. With almost 20 scientific employees and around 10 external doctoral students, the ICPS is one of the largest and most important research institutes at the university. Prof. Dr. Alexander Jesser, head of the ICPS, will personally lead the expedition and give us fascinating insights into the institute's current research projects and developments.

The institute is dedicated to a variety of exciting and forward-looking topics, including industrial image and speech processing, robotics, predictive maintenance, IoT and Industry 4.0, networking and cyber security in the industrial environment. State-of-the-art artificial intelligence methods are used to develop innovative and intelligent solutions. At the beginning of the expedition, a comprehensive overview of the diverse research projects of the ICPS will be presented.

A particular highlight of the event will be the detailed presentation of the Unify project. This sub-project of the larger Induko (Innovation through Collaboration) overall project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Markus Speidel and Prof. Dr. Alexander Jesser.

The Unify project aims to develop a data protection-compliant messenger service for existing teaching and learning environments. The messenger services currently available on the market are often not optimally suited for use in educational environments and often do not meet the necessary data protection requirements. The new messenger service should be able to be seamlessly integrated into the Ilias platform used at Heilbronn University, but is also intended for integration into other existing platforms. Another exciting research approach within this project is to intelligently bring together groups of people with similar interests across different platforms. Advanced AI methods such as LLMs (Large Language Models) and federated learning strategies are used here. The first demonstrator of this innovative approach is already being presented.

Another central aspect of the project is the increasingly important protection of know-how in academic research. A communication platform based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is being developed. This platform guarantees tamper-proof and transparent data storage. This will enable researchers and other stakeholders to securely distribute and store trustworthy data.

Location

Bildungscampus North
Building S (No. 17) - Room S041
Bildungscampus 17
74076 Heilbronn

Program

16:50 - Check-In & Get-Together
17:00 - Start of the ICPS expedition
18:00 - Exchange & networking with snacks & drinks
18:30 - End of the expedition (followed by the general meeting)

For better planning, we ask for a short, informal registration by e-mail or LinkedIn.

To the LinkedIn event