Curtain Call

The AIT experts' research services for our customers and partners meet with great international recognition. This has been proven by numerous awards and distinctions. That also contributes to AIT being a first point of contact in major multilateral projects.

Guest professorship in Paris As of 1 November 2019, Matthias Weber, Head of Center for Innovation Systems and Policy (centre, with Martina Neuländtner and Christoph Brodnik), has been appointed Visiting Professor at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Science, Innovation et Societé (LISIS) at the University of Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée (UPEM) for an initial period of three years. One of the goals here is the further expansion of the European research infrastructure RISIS (Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Policy Studies), but also the further development of concepts for a transformative innovation policy. Weber's visiting professorship is part of the French Excellence and Future Investment Programme for profiling university partnerships. It supports the merger of UPEM with five other universities in the south-east of Paris to form the new Université Gustave Eiffel as of 1 January 2020. The latter belongs to the new generation of French universities that are specifically developing interdisciplinary thematic priorities with high international visibility. In the case of the Université Gustave Eiffel, these are the areas "Innovation" and "Urban Transformation". In the medium term, a further intensification of cooperation between LISIS and the AIT Center for Innovation Systems and Policy is planned.

VCÖ Mobility Award 2019 for Autonomous Ticketing Markus Ray, Head of the Dynamic Transportation Systems Competence Unit at the AIT Center for Mobility Systems, accepted the VCÖ Mobility Award 2019 in the category "Digitisation" on behalf of his entire team at a festive gala in Vienna's Odeon theatre: the winner was the submission on the topic of "Autonomous Ticketing of the Next Generation". With the MODE technology, AIT lays the foundation for a future smartphone-based ticketing system for public transport. Autonomous Ticketing works by reliably collecting information about the route, connecting points and the means of transport used. Additional operator-side infrastructure or active user interactions have thus become obsolete.

HERMES 2019 Verkehrs.Logistik Award for AIT project The "GrazLog" project, submitted by the city of Graz and managed by AIT, received the HERMES 2019 Verkehrs.Logistik Award [Transport.Logistics Award] in the sustainability category. AIT Project Manager Martin Reinthaler: "The HERMES Transport. Logistics Award is a great honour for our project and shows that our work for efficient and sustainable city logistics is very valuable." The focus of GrazLog is on cooperatively used inner-city logistics hubs. A city logistics centre, a so-called city hub, is installed in which the delivery and handling of goods as well as the collection of returns will be handled all in one.

High recognition for AIT team The promotional award of the Deutsche Hochdruckliga e.V. DHL® [German Hypertension League] for sports and non-drug therapy for hypertension went to AIT researchers Martin Bachler (picture) and Siegfried Wassertheurer together with their German colleagues Walter Sehnert and Thomas Mengden for their work "Non-Invasive Quantification of the Effect of Device-Guided Slow Breathing with Direct Feedback to the Patient to Reduce Blood Pressure".

AIT researcher ranks among the most frequently quoted worldwide Angela Sessitsch, Head of Competence Unit Bioresources, was listed for the second year in a row as one of the most frequently quoted researchers worldwide. Scientific papers published and cited between 2008 and 2018 were used for the analysis of the data group Clarivate Analytics. Among the 6,216 listed scientists, 44 persons partly conduct research in Austria. In addition to her work at AIT, Angela Sessitsch is Vice President of the ÖGMBT – Austrian Association of Molecular Life Sciences and Biotechnology and teaches at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.

Award for best dissertation Johannes Österreicher, Scientist at the LKR Leichtmetallkompetenzzentrum Ranshofen, won first prize in the PhD competition 2019 of the International Society for Stereology and Image Analysis (ISSIA). Stereology is the spatial interpretation of sections. In his PhD thesis "Characterization of Al-Mg-Si Alloys for Automotive Safety Parts", Österreicher worked on quantitative scanning electron microscopy of nanoscale particles distributed in solid media.

Disaster protection solution received eAWARD 2020 AIT received the eAward in the “E-Government” category for the implementation of the so-called Public Safety Hub (PSH) which was developed in cooperation with the Department of Civil Protection and Defense in the Office of the State Government of Styria. Against the background of IT "island solutions" having emer ged in the field of crisis and disaster management over the last few decades in various organizations, which has made it difficult to exchange information between the various IT systems, the PSH enables a seamless exchange of information between both military and ci vil IT systems for the first time. Thus, the PSH enables the responsible actors to improve operational plan ning and provide faster assistance in the event of a crisis.

New approaches to vehicle cyber security AIT has won several awards at the eAward. The Austrian specialist for model-based system development Lieber- Lieber Software and AIT received the award for the new cyber security management system THREATGET. With the introduction of the new Euro pean safety directive according to ECE Level, vehicle manufacturers must demonstrably verify the cyber security of their vehicle systems in order to obtain approval of their products. With THREATGET, "Se curity by Design" becomes a reality: It provides developers with a tool to identify threats already during the design phase of new systems, allowing them to quickly assess the associated risks.

Best Poster Award for energy efficiency concept With the Poster Award, AIT has supported almost 200 young talents over the past ten years. The AIT Poster Award is significantly supported by the know-how of the partners tecnet and accent. The winner of the Poster Award 2019 is Ksenia Poplavskaya from the AIT Center for Energy, with her work "inteGREATER: Integrate Congestion Management and Markets for Greater System Efficiency”. Poplavskaya explains how a network bottleneck in the energy system causes higher network costs and consequently higher network tariffs. To solve this problem, Poplavskaya has developed a software algorithm that integrates the energy market and the transmission grids and enables day-to-day decision-making by transmissi on system operators. The energy market dynamics with the available grid capacities can thus be used optimally, congestion management costs can be sa ved, and more renewables can actually be integrated. Sophie Knöttner from the Center for Energy won second place with her poster for "Optimized Energy System Operation – A Contribution to Industry 4.0”. Her deliberations on the optimization of energy use in industry are intended to help reduce energy costs and the environmental impact, as well as to ensure grea ter flexibility of electricity supply and increasingly establishing renewable energy. Patrik Aspermair from the Competence Unit BioSensor Technologies took third place for "Smell Sensing 4.0: Organic Semicon ductors for Biosensing”. He addresses the question: "How can we capture smell digitally?” and presents approaches that technologically capture the sense of smell. Aims include the automatic detection of spoiled food in supermarkets and in the development of diseases in animal husbandry.

Staatspreis Mobilität 2019 for COMPAS The State Prize is the highest award bestowed by the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) on Austrian companies and institutions. The COM PAS project was awarded the State Prize for Mobility 2019 in the category “Research. Development. Opening up new avenues". COMPAS was submitted by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology together with the partners Bombardier Transportation Austria GmbH and Mission Embedded GmbH. In the COMPAS research project, new scientific approaches and ra pid innovation cycles are used to significantly increase the driving safety of trams with the aid of imaging systems. The aim of the joint initiative of Austrian research and industry is an "intelligent tram" which continuously records and analyses its surroundings and thus supports tram drivers in ensuring optimum driving safety.

Simone Kriglstein receives the Honourable Mention Award Simone Kriglstein from the Center for Technology Experience received an Honourable Mention Award at the CHI conference for her paper "See, Feel, Move – Player Behaviour Analysis through Combined Visualization of Gaze, Emotions, and Movement". She received the pri ze together with Daniel Kepplinger, Günter Wallner and Michael Lankes. Kriglstein's research topics include human-computer interaction and game experience. The gaming area in particular, or the topic of gamifica tion, respectively, are becoming increasingly exciting for the Experience Business Transformation compe tence unit – since on the one hand, it has been a strong growth market in recent years (more than 40 billion dollars in 2018) and, on the other hand, experience from the gaming market and gamification mechanis ms can be used for other areas (B2B platforms or customer loyalty measures, among others).

AIT researcher wins 5G Red Arrow Award Thomas Zemen was awarded the "Red Arrow 2019" at the Infrastructure Symposium 2019 of Future Busi ness Austria. The 5G wireless technology is a key topic for the infrastructure as well as for making Austria an even more attractive business location. AIT is there fore working together with e.g. Nokia and AVL in the field of autonomous and networked vehicles in the BMK research project MARCONI ("ICT of the Future" programme) to develop special 5G-based multiple antenna systems.