"Full steam ahead towards digitalization"

The LAB4DTE digitization café in December focused on the Internet of Things and human-technology interaction. Georg Kästle, CIO and CDO of Vollmer Werke Maschinenfabrik GmbH, was a guest at RWU as an external speaker. In his lecture "From sensor to business model and back again", the lecturer in the Master's degree course in Digital Business provided insights into the practical implementation of digitalization and the scaling of digital services in the smart factory sector. "The cloud is the steam engine in the age of Industry 4.0," said Georg Kästle, "it's going full steam ahead towards digitalization." The audience followed suit: "It's captivating how the lecturers present their topics here," said Felicitas Lock, a business informatics student at RWU.

RWU professors Dr. Jürgen Friedl and Dr. Markus Rager addressed technical and business aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT) and human-technology interaction in their presentations. This created a holistic picture of the opportunities and challenges of the IoT. Both speakers encouraged the guests to actively use the new technologies. "No matter how we move, the world will change," said Markus Rager.

Where industry and universities can work together and learn from each other

Finally, Simon Eberhard, research associate at LAB4DTE, presented areas of application for human-technology interaction through voice, such as a reminder function for taking medication coupled with an IoT device. The examples ranged all the way to the API-based connection of SAP production orders. Finally, the interaction between a talking avatar, a human and the autonomous robot TEMI was demonstrated as part of a picking process. "It's exciting to see," said Harald Steinhilber, Director Digital Infrastructure and Technologies at Rentschler Biopharma SE, "where we from industry can work together with regional universities and learn from each other."

Afterwards, the participants had the opportunity to visit RWU's innovation lab, LAB4DTE. Various showcases from the fields of business intelligence & machine learning, IoT & mobile services, 3D sensor technology, cloud computing & distributed architectures and automation & robotics could be experienced there. Over snacks and drinks, there was also the opportunity to talk about what we had heard and seen.