Press

In June 2021, the research project “SPELL” was launched. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, it will run for three years.

Vienna/Austria, June 24, 2021 – Major tech and automotive industry players officially partner to develop state-of-the-art technology for autonomous vehicles. The partners and leaders in their domain include Arm, Audi together with CARIAD – the automotive software company of VW group, BASELABS, CoreAVI, DENSO, Five, the German Fraunhofer IESE, NXP, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and TTTech Auto. Under the umbrella of “The Autonomous”, the members of this first Working Group are committed to working towards a safe system architecture for self-driving vehicles. The goal of this collaboration is to lay the basis for safety standardization and pave the way for mass autonomous vehicle production.

Dr. Jörg Dörr became Professor of Digital Farming at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (TUK) at the beginning of April. Among other things, Dörr will focus on the digital transformation in agriculture, research new technologies, and develop these in an application-oriented manner. The main objective will be to build digital agricultural ecosystems, with the focus on software and systems engineering: managing and administering data and supporting agricultural processes with automation technologies. In addition to holding the new Chair, which is part of the Department of Computer Science, Professor Dörr’s responsibilities as a member of the extended institute management of Fraunhofer IESE include the research program Smart Farming. The association Friends of Digital Farming made it possible to establish this Chair at TUK, which will be supported in the long term by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

This year, the Computer Society of the international engineering association IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) will award one of the highest honors for professional lifetime achievement – the Harlan D. Mills Award 2021 – to Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dieter Rombach, in recognition of his many years of sustained and impactful contributions and leadership in research, teaching, and technology transfer in the area of empirical software engineering. Prof. Rombach has been a Fellow of the IEEE Computer Society since 2003. The award has been given since 1999 and is one of the most prestigious awards in the field of computer science and information technology.

HiPEAC, a European network of almost 2,000 world-class computing systems researchers, named Dr. Matthias Jung (Fraunhofer IESE), Lukas Steiner and Norbert Wehn (TU Kaiserslautern) as winners of the prestigious Tech Transfer Award for their work on DRAMSys4.0.

At the beginning of January, the two-year joint research project “BaSys überProd” on the topic of “Cross-company production support” through software started with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project is primarily aimed at manufacturing companies.

Agriculture is one of the pioneering industries in terms of digitalization. Now the German Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, Julia Klöckner, is also leading the way in the smart handling of the increasing amount of agricultural data in Europe: Germany will be the first country in the EU to establish a comprehensive government-run data platform.

In the context of the German EU Council Presidency, the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, together with universities and research institutes in the state, will present the European digital conference “TRUSTinAI. Responsible AI for Science and Society”.

Infrastructure projects such as road and bridge construction are complex and expensive construction projects. The more complex the project, the more demanding it becomes to meet the agreed deadlines, quality targets, and cost objectives. The research project “Infra-Bau 4.0” addresses this problem. The goal is to develop a platform on which all partners involved in a construction project are mapped digitally with their various resources and processes and are networked within a single Digital Ecosystem. This will enable effective and efficient planning and re-planning of construction – even for complex projects in a volatile context. As the technical-scientific project lead, Fraunhofer IESE will focus particularly on ecosystem modeling and platform design. The German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (Bundesministerium für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur – BMVI) is funding the project until the end of 2021 with more than four million euros.

As a pioneer in applied research, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft brings together the expertise of 23 separate Fraunhofer facilities to develop new development and production technologies for innovative cell and gene therapeutics, as well as vaccines, in the “Production for Intelligent Medicine” innovation cluster. As a first step of the project, a concept for a modular pilot plant for the automatic production of these therapeutics is to be developed combining both Industry 4.0 and Health 4.0.