Industry Meetup

On 14 June 2022, our first “RWTH Innovation | Industry Meetup” took place at the Collective Incubator in Aachen. We welcomed our key account partners from Siemens, TotalEnergies, RA Consulting and Ford as well as Huawei and BMW (virtually) and had lively discussions about different topics concerning the exchange between academia and industry.

We started with an overview of the Profile Areas of RWTH Aachen University which already led to first touch points between both worlds. The profile areas are a great way to start the interaction with the university since they combine different chairs around one specific topic. Bram Wijlands gave an exclusive sneak preview into new transfer strategies of the university and received valuable feedback from the industry which in turn will be included into the current development. We will share more about this once our experts have finalized the new approach.

Research and innovation in AI

Our personal highlight was the keynote of Prof. Holger Hoos who explained how and why AI will shape the future of science and engineering. Key learnings from his presentation and the following discussions: It requires diversity in AI expertise and perspective to build trustworthy, human-centred AI. We need to use AI to build, deploy and monitor next-generation AI systems (AutoAI) to ensure that non-experts can work with this technology.

Since the overall topic of this exchange was AI, we had two start-ups present their solutions in the field: First up was ANTICIPATE who developed a no-code platform which enables engineers to realize AI vision solutions within days instead of months. Use cases include work-safety recognition and in-line quality inspection. After that, ambeRoad demonstrated how a company can save time and money by employing a smart internal search engine for documents like text, picture, video and chat messages. With AmberSearch, employees no longer waste precious time looking for this one presentation that they held two years ago.

Common ground for start-ups and joint projects

Our partners also got a tour through the Collective Incubator, the hotspot location for start-ups, students and companies with co-working and maker spaces. During the tour they could see the current state of the workspace with the machine park on the ground floor and get a feeling of a vibrant co-working culture where innovative minds come together.

Throughout the day, our partners and speakers already identified common ground for future collaborations and discussed first steps for joint projects. We are planning on organizing this get-together with varying thematic spotlights twice a year for our industry partners so that they can get to know each other better on a neutral platform and learn more about research and strategic topics of RWTH.