Hack for the Future 

The Business & Information Systems Engineering Department at the University of Bayreuth organised the Hackathon "Hack for the Future - Enabling Technologies for a Sustainable Future" at the University of Bayreuth on 13 and 14 January 2023 together with the Fraunhofer FIT Business Informatics Department and the Core Competence Centre Finance & Information Management. The hack was supported by TenneT TSO GmbH as well as by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts as part of the ABBA project. The ABBA project aims to qualify future academic professionals by implementing AI in higher education as a contribution to competence-oriented and didactically high-quality teaching.

The interdisciplinary teams, consisting of students of business administration, computer science as well as business informatics and industrial engineering, worked on use cases around the question: "How can digital technologies be used for a sustainable economy and society?" After a short key note by the two post-docs from Bayreuth's Department of Business & Information Systems Engineering, Dr Marc-Fabian Körner and Dr Peter Hofmann, the teams developed concepts for the use of various digital technologies for a sustainable future within 24 hours. "The hackathon is not only about skilfully using digital technologies from the fields of blockchain, self-sovereign identities, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, but also about profitably combining them with sustainable business models," Dr Körner explained the idea behind the event.

The processing was followed by the pitch session, in which the students had to convince the jury, consisting of Dr Körner, Dr Hofmann and Dr Nolting (TenneT), in a very short time. All teams showed impressive results and a high degree of stamina as well as creativity in finding solutions. In the end, the winning team was the SunPowerSquad team with a solution for detecting dirty photovoltaic systems using object recognition software. Second place went to the GhostFactory team with a solution for the intelligent and sustainable use of free production capacities in geographically distributed companies. Third place went to the AIrboard team, which developed a dashboard for processing air pollution data to forecast maintenance work on grid transmission systems. Dr. Hofmann finally drew a positive conclusion: "We were very impressed by the versatile and technically sound results of all participants. It was not easy for us to select the winning teams, as all groups presented convincing approaches to solutions. We are pleased that there is so much interest in the use of digital technologies for a sustainable future and look forward to continuing to develop innovative ideas together with students and doctoral students, but also with companies, in the future." On behalf of TenneT, Dr Nolting summed up: "We are impressed by how quickly the students from different disciplines have familiarised themselves with complex topics such as the management of decentralised flexibility potential, the prediction of air quality for the design of insulators or resource-saving supply chain optimisation. From our point of view, the event was a complete success."