At the beginning of the semester, the teaching program for the students of the master program E-PiCo in Kiel has started. This is already the second semester for the master students. We warmly welcome all newcomers here in Kiel.

The four-semester, English-language master's program E-PiCo is offered jointly by a consortium of partner universities: École Centrale de Nantes (France), Università degli Studi dell'Aquila (Italy), University Politehnica of Bucharest (Romania) and CAU. It is aimed at bachelor's graduates in electrical engineering or a similar field and includes charging and power optimization, energy management, battery life cycle, power electronics, mathematical system modeling and simulation, control and automation technology, optimization, among others. Various technological specializations of the partner universities and international industrial partners from the automotive, aerospace, logistics or transportation sectors complement the program.

The Research Minister is pleased that the European AI-NET project (AI-NET is abbreviating the English term "Accelerating Digital Transformation in Europe by Intelligent NETwork Automation") is now beginning. Prof. Pachnicke and his chair are involved in the large-scale project as part of the research of so-called resilient optical network structures (details).

Minister Karliczek commented: "I am pleased that the European AI-NET project is now beginning to explore the potential of artificial intelligence for automating the control of high-performance networks in order to guarantee network operation, optimize resource consumption and flexibly configure services. The three German project pillars will make an important contribution to this. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding them with around 36 million euros for three years each." (traslated from German)

A new lecture hall building is currently under construction at the faculty, as is the Center for Networked Sensor Systems. Since there are only a few people at the faculty at the moment due to the pandemic, we show a short video of the current state of construction here. In the area behind building D, a so-called construction road is currently being built, so that the corresponding construction materials can be easily brought to the faculty. Behind it the new lecture hall building will be built. The Center for Networked Sensor Systems will find its new home near Building B. It is good to see that construction is progressing well so far.

Photo: FH Kiel / Matthias Pilch

Prof. Dr. Sabah Badri-Hoeher, associate member of the Faculty of Engineering of CAU Kiel, receives the prestigious Innovation Award 2021 of the state capital Kiel. This prize is awarded every second year.

Professor Dr. Sabah Badri-Hoeher is a physicist and engineer specializing in electrical engineering and information technology. For twelve years, she has headed the Digital Signal Processing group at Kiel University of Applied Sciences (FH Kiel) in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Her studies in Casablanca and Paderborn led her first to the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen as well as to the universities in Bremen and Oldenburg, before she accepted the professorship at FH Kiel in 2009. At the Faculty of Engineering of CAU Kiel, she regularly gives lectures on the topic of underwater techniques. With numerous projects, she succeeded in building up underwater information technology in Kiel and giving it international visibility. The Autonomous Underwater Robots (AUV) that Badri-Hoeher is developing with her team can be used in the future, for example, to inspect and maintain offshore wind farms or as an AUV swarm in shallow and deep waters.

On February 26, the 71st meeting of the ITG group " signal processing and machine learning" was organized by Dr. Uwe Kretschmer and Dr. Jan Abshagen of the German Military Technical Service for Ships and Naval Weapons, Maritime Technology and Research (WTD 71) together with the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Prof. Schmidt). The meeting focused on applications in the maritime field of signal processing, measurement technology and machine learning, with a total of six lectures on new developments in the field of SONAR systems. The pandemic was the result of the meeting online. All in all, everything worked well and students were admitted for the 71st session for the first time. One of the student participants, Karoline Seidel, said after the meeting: "I attended the ITG expert group meeting because I am currently writing my thesis in the field of underwater signal processing and am very interested in the topics. Above all, I found the diversity of the topics covered in the lectures and how they are theoretically and practically researched really exciting." The next meeting will take place on 15 October in Stuttgart, hosted by Prof. Bin Yang. In addition to the members of the group, interested doctoral students and students are also welcome here.

The IEEE Brain Initiative presents The Second Place Award to Team University of Kiel at the IEEE Brain Data Bank Challenge, partnering with IEEE Sensors conference 2019. The interdisciplinary team of re-searchers from University of Kiel, formed by Matthias Schneider, Maria Avitha Francis, Hendrik Lehmann, Igor Barg and Andreas Bahr presented an innovative project on epileptic seizure detection with neural net-works for medical implants.

An epileptic seizure is an abnormal activity of the brain caused by a rapid discharge of large groups of neurons. The idea is to treat a seizure promptly by detecting this and supply local medication in time. A medical implant records the biopotential signals, which are then evaluated with the help of a convolutional neural network (CNN), and in the event of a seizure being detected, an electrochemical pump is activated, which ensures local medication. The CNN is trained offline with approximately 40-50 hours of EEG (electroencephalogram) data and is implemented on a low-power micro-controller that fits into the medical implant. A possible implementation of such a network on a RISC-V microprocessor will also be shown.

This work was supported by DFG research projects Materials for Brain and the CRC 1261. The DFG-funded Research Training Group 2154 ”Materials for Brain” investigates nano- and microscale therapeutically active coatings for their suitability as implants to treat three selected diseases of the brain.