Day 9: Four Electrifying Presentations

Campus activity work

Mike Kahnert - March 29, 2016

The day should start like every day. You wake up between eight and nine, get your delicious breakfast and start the day well nourished. Though like every day, this day too should be special. Because today was the "first day of school" for our business students and additionally the final presentations by our four master students.

The first lecture "Management Science" lasted from 9:30am until 10:45am and was lead by Alexander Bulychev. This lecture deals with economical problems and tries to solve them on a mathematical way to reach a rational solution.

Between 11:00am and 12:15pm followed a meeting of the whole group inside the Webb Center to talk about the further course of the day and to work a bit on each project work. A very interesting presentation by Dollar Tree followed at 12:20pm inside the Constant Hall. This presentation was probably used to acquire students for their company. Dollar Tree could be compared to 99cent shops, though it gains a lot of sales inside the USA. 8.6 mio. USD on sales in 2015 with 13,000 branches. Additionally a little snack was served before the presentation startet, nuggets with dip.

"Project Management in Info Systems" was the second lecture for the business students on this day between 1:30pm and 14:45pm. This course was lead by Jimme Carraway, whom we evaluated as a fair and strict character. Mr. Carraway teaches the students how to handle projects the best way from planning through execution until the final control. He mentioned a so called "list" which should be worked off to make a project successful.

At this point half the day was done and the countdown for the electro engineers and the final show began. Last adjustments were made and the tension grew but you couldn´t see a drop of sweat on the master students faces, although they should do their first english presentation in front of at least half professional audience.

But for the time being the show startet with four presentations from the american master students lead by Tamer Nadeem at 5:30pm.

They were about:

- a bluethooth security system which contacted the user on their smart phone or smart watch in case of unwanted activities inside their house

- the investigation of driving habits by using sensors inside the steering weel, f.e. to determine hand position, grip strength or humidity

- communication between vehicles to prevent collisions and to create another stepping stone towards full automatic driving

- a possibility for tethering and wireless to work together to build faster networks, from which mostly slower devices would profit

Even though these presentations were impressive the german students were a step ahead because their products were already finished and prototypes of them were presented on the Cebit in Hannover this year.

The start made Georg Schmidt with S.I.V.E., a sensor-controlled content transfer device. Like every project from the master students was the theme of this one to make a museum visit more exciting or fun for the visiters. Abdelhak Amrissal und Erika Dezsö are design students and worked with Georg together to realise this project. The idea was to let the visitor decide with his positioning which information he wanted to see about the exhibit. This was measured through the distance between visitor and exhibit.

After him followed Fabian Binde who worked together with Laura Evers and Miriam Landenberger on Informationdensitycontroller. The approach behind their work was to let the user decide which density of information he wanted to experience. This could be controlled with the help of an app and between detailed information and a short summary was everything possible to know about an object.

The Third one was Stefan Ruzicka who worked together with Elena Bergen und Florentin Förschler on Connectibition. This team prefert a more solid way of approaching the problem. With Connectibition the user could use an interactive surface and small replicas of the exhibits to learn about connections between them, f.e. if their is a historic connection between a painting and a statue.

The last but not the least was finally Eric Schmieder who worked together with Mareike Gabele, Robert Klank and Nicolas Pepping on L.U.M.E.N.. L.U.M.E.N. provides a more exciting and adventurous approach. They used self made lantern which would glow brighter if you got the right direction and darker if you followed the wrong way. Reaching a key point of the tour or an exhibit a soundfile would play inside the light und knowledge would be shared among the visitors abount the exhibit. Of course nightly use is highly reccomended.

Applause and congratulations for the excellent presentations were made after Eric finished his but hurry was necessary because an important assignment should still follow and it was already 7:00pm. The next station was the O'Conners Brewery and the last serving of beer should be made at 7:30pm. We all wanted the by Mr. Herzog highly recommended beer and everyone wanted to taste the feeling of accomplishment after such a long day. By the way even a nice conversation with present americans could be made and girls and boys were evenly seduced by a cute dog of an american couple.

Finally after a long and stressful day should follow dinner at a sushi bar called Volcano. It is not like one should eat burger and fries every day, but still possible inside the nation of freedom and delicous fast food.

By Mike Kahnert