Interdisciplinary collaboration has a special status at emergenCITY. For four years now, the research center has been honoring special collaborations of the scientific staff in publications with the emergenCITY Collaboration Award. The LOEWE Center’s Distinguished Emeriti Ralf Steinmetz and Max Mühlhäuser selected three winning papers from the numerous publications that emerged from emergenCITY in the past year. At the award ceremony, Matthias Hollick, scientific coordinator of emergenCITY, emphasized:

“Germany is not a country where young scientists are patted on the back particularly much for their achievements. We want to recognize good accomplishments.”

During the emergenCITY week, Hollick announced the scientists who had won the prize.

Place 3 - Tobias Gebhard

“Automated Generation of Urban Medium-voltage Grids using OpenStreetMap Data” with Andrea Tundis and Florian Steinke

For the paper presented at the renowned IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies conference, Tobias Gebhard conducted research together with emergenCITY PI Florian Steinke and DLR Institute for the Protection of Terrestrial Infrastructures research group leader Andrea Tundis. Together, they have developed a new method that can automatically generate topologies of electrical distribution grids in urban areas. The process uses only OpenStreetMapt data on power infrastructure, street layouts and land use.

The jury particularly emphasized the focus on the transfer of research results into application via a case study included in the paper and the open science approach through the use of open data and open source software.

Two people in front of a screen with details of the awarded paper
© emergenCITY

Matthias Hollick (left) congratulates Tobias Gebhard (right) on winning third place in the emergenCITY Collaboration Award

2nd place - Florentin Putz and Steffen Haesler

“Sounds Good? Fast and Secure Contact Exchange in Groups” with Matthias Hollick

Florentin Putz and Steffen Haesler compared two secure contact exchange systems for their article written together with emergenCITY coordinator Matthias Hollick. In a lab study, they evaluated the usability of SafeSlinger, the current state-of-the-art, in comparison with their newly designed protocol PairSonic.

The jury particularly appreciated the collaboration of the emergenCITY program areas Communication and Information as well as the open access of the lab study dataset, the PairSonic app and its code. The article also won the Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW).

1st place - Christian A. Schroth, Christian Eckrich, Stefan Fabian

“Emergency Response Person Localization and Vital Sign Estimation Using a Semi-Autonomous Robot Mounted SFCW Radar” with Ibrahim Kakouche, Oskar von Stryk, Abdelhak M. Zoubir, Michael Muma

Christian Schroth, Christian Eckrich and Stefan Fabian researched radar-based approaches in rescue robotics for their article. They equipped a semi-autonomous robot with a commercially available through-wall radar system that can detect and localize multiple people and assess their breathing rate.

Here, three emergenCITY program areas collaborated with an international team, which the jury rated particularly positively. Published in the renowned IEEE Journal Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the article has already been cited many times. The data set with 62 use cases at various difficulty levels of the stage rescue situations has also been published.