HITeC is the research and technology transfer center of the Department of Computer Science at the Universität 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 Universität Hamburg. The association is linked to the Universität 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 2022, HITeC had six 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 2022 was approximately €4.6 million. The increased project volume was achieved, beside others, through the launch of several new projects.
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 stimulates this research. 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 this method. 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. As a further method, HITeC applies Design Science, which considers the problem solution in real application-oriented settings through the development of artifacts such as prototypes or concepts.
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 typically with partners.
Some selected projects and activities in 2022:
- Projects in the area of cheminformatics, which study drug development in pharmaceutical research.
- Projects in the area of optimization and monitoring:
- Performance monitoring for data-intensive software
- Code optimization for memory hierarchies
- Several projects in the area of application of Artificial Intelligence methods:
- Analysis of images, videos and streams for the creation of situation and action descriptions (including in sports, here also actions in training, traffic and landscape overflights) and the retrieval of media content,
- New methods for explainable AI,
- Planning systems for stacking goods using Reinforcement Learning.
- Projects in the area of platform development:
- Co-development of a platform for economic ecosystem resilience,
- Co-development of a platform for synthetic data generation,
- Design of a platform for urban production and local value networks,
- Coordination of a European Digital Innovation Hub, for the targeted support of small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups, and public administration.
- Several projects in the field of eHumanities, which aim at the dissemination, collection, presentation, and long-term archiving of cultural objects, among others: Portal for Philosophical and Hebrew Terminology, Matriculation Portal.
- Several projects in the field of digital transformation and digital lite-racy :
- Scientific support in the digital transformation of the re-registration service/electronic residence registration,
- Teaching of digital literacy competence through student seminars.
- Furthermore smaller projects:
- With companies and research institutions from the Hamburg region as well as internationally,
- With schools to teach software development methods at an early stage.
- Participation in a working group of start-up initiatives of all Hamburg universities as well as cooperation with ahoi.digital, ARIC, and Hamburg Innovation.