Summary HITeC Annual Report 2020

HITeC is the research and technology transfer center of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hamburg. Due to its independent status, HITeC offers flexible and professional cooperation opportunities. HITeC solutions are based on the latest research results and provide advantages through innovative technologies.

HITeC is a registered, non-profit association supported by members of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hamburg. The association is linked to the University of Hamburg by an agreement.

HITeC sees its main tasks in the:

  • Implementation of application-oriented research projects
  • Dissemination of application-oriented research results
  • Realization of seminars and workshops
  • Mediation of contacts between companies and students
  • Improvement of the practice-oriented education in the university
  • Support for business start-ups from the university
  • Education of students especially through including them in cooperation projects

In 2020 HITeC had five sponsoring members, these are companies and institutions that support HITeC. The number of active personal members of HITeC is more than 50.

HITeC’s project volume in 2020 was approximately 1.9 Million Euro.

The following changes were made to the Executive Board in 2020: Wiebke Frauen left the Executive Board. The Executive Board and the Board of Directors thank her sincerely for the very good cooperation over the past years, in particular for the clarification of formal processes at HITeC. Dr. Lothar Hotz was elected sole Managing Director as of 2020.

HITeC conducts application-oriented research in the general field of Computer Science and research in the field of technology transfer. In contrast to basic research, application-oriented research is scientific Computer Science research whose results can be used directly in practice. On the one hand, the results of basic research are incorporated into cooperative projects; on the other hand, new questions for basic research arise through research on applications, which decisively further stimulate this research. This is a method also known as Action Research, in which scientists go into the concrete, real conditions in practice in order to gain knowledge for further basic research. In addition, this way back into basic research (which essentially takes place at the university) is a very important part of the application-oriented research at HITeC, in order to fertilize this basic research in a completely new way, so that it can later find better application-relevant results for practice.

Hence, application-oriented research at HITeC takes up the results of basic research at the Department of Computer Science and explores their possible applications in special application projects (often with partners).

Some selected projects and activities in 2020:

  • Start of the research project Future Transport Hamburg (FTH) in the field of Blockchain, which develops, applies, and tests an open freight exchange for an increased utilization of trucks.
  • Several industry projects in the areas of distributed IoT systems, digital transformation for health insurers, use of IT in chemical informatics, and development of APPs for the energy industry using new software development methods.
  • Several projects in the field of application of Artificial Intelligence methods: new workshop series in cooperation with the Artificial Intelligence Center Hamburg e.V. (ARIC), implementation of a web service for the prediction of the metabolism of active ingredients, scientific consulting service collection of spoken language data, automatic transcription of spoken language data, autonomous adaptive machines, meeting minute bot and AI consulting, RoboCup-AG – Hamburg Bit-Bots, AI systems for marketing content for the automobile industries.
  • Several projects in the field of eHumanities aiming at the dissemination, collection, presentation, and long-term archiving of cultural objects: Portal for Philosophical and Hebrew Terminology, adaptable university bibliography with MyCoRe, matriculation portal, distributed software development in heterogeneous groups.
  • Several projects in the area of Digital Transformation and Digital Literacy as well as support in the organization of the ITMC Conference at the Faculty of Computer Science with approx. 150 participants.
  • Many smaller projects, mainly with companies and research institutions from the Hamburg region.
  • Participation in a working group of the founding initiatives of all Hamburg Universities as well as cooperation with ahoi.digital, ARIC, and Hamburg Innovation.

Publications of HITeC are listed on the websites of the university of the respective professors and project collaborators.