Furtwangen University showcased in Strasbourg
Furtwangen University was represented at the first “UR Futur Festival of Technical Universities in the Upper Rhine” in Strasbourg from 5 - 7 November. As part of the festival, at the “URAI” symposium on artificial intelligence and at the interactive exhibition “UR Futur Experience,” Internal link opens in the same window:Dr. Daniel Schönle from HFU and his team presented cutting-edge research in the field of medical AI as well as an Industry 4.0 demonstrator from the semester project “Smart Factory Cockpit.”
The “UR Futur Festival,” jointly organised by Alsace Tech and the TriRhenaTech Alliance, transformed Strasbourg's “Manufacture des Tabacs” into a cross-border innovation laboratory. The festival brings together universities of applied sciences and grandes écoles from the Upper Rhine region and presents technologies, prototypes, and solutions that will shape the Upper Rhine of tomorrow. Within the “UR Futur Experience” exhibition, 14 partner universities presented around 40 projects in an immersive, interactive environment. Visitors were able to learn what is taught at the partner universities by experiencing concrete demonstrators and getting to know the people behind them.
UR Futur Experience: Industry 4.0 in real time with Smart Factory Cockpit
As part of the exhibition, Furtwangen University presented the semester project “Smart Factory Cockpit” under the direction of Dr. Schönle. He was supported at the booth by student ambassadors Nils Danton D'Souza and Nico Pergande. Together, they explained the demonstrator, invited visitors to try it out, and answered questions about studying at Furtwangen University. The Smart Factory Cockpit addresses a key challenge of Industry 4.0 − traditional production monitoring systems often lack real-time visualisation and cannot sufficiently integrate heterogeneous data sources such as machines, sensors, and IT systems. This leads to limited transparency in complex production environments.
The project team developed an interactive monitoring system that combines a physical demonstrator with a complete digital twin stack:
- a fully automated ordering system orchestrates two coordinated robotic arms that cover the entire production cycle from order determination to storage
- all process steps, including sorting, handling, and storage, are recorded as metrics and displayed in real time.
- “Eclipse BaSyx” acts as a central digital twin platform and manages the asset administration shells of robot arms and production components.
- a combination of “BaSyx,” “Prometheus,” and “Grafana” transforms raw data into meaningful dashboards for live monitoring of production steps, system statuses, and error statuses
- docker containers orchestrate all components and offer a scalable, cloud-compatible architecture
- an HTML-based user interface communicates directly with the BaSyx framework and triggers ordering processes
- all containers and blocks for the physical setup were 3D-printed at HFU, with a custom design that increases fault tolerance during gripping and handling
The result is a fully functional demonstrator with an automated production process and complete digital twin integration, clearly showing how transparency and efficiency in production can be tangibly increased.
“This festival showed today's students what the technology of the future will look like,” says Dr. Schönle. "In addition, the collaboration with the TV station Arte made it possible to experience this future practice in special workshops. I was impressed by the consistently positive attitude toward automation and artificial intelligence." During the two days of the exhibition, the booth attracted many high school and college students who tested the system and watched the robot arms in action. Many were particularly surprised at how digital twins linked physical processes and data. Dr. Daniel Schönle reports on a typical reaction at the booth, “Many people did not expect that every movement of the robot arm could be tracked live on the user interfaces.”
URAI Symposium
Dr. Daniel Schönle (HFU Faculty I: Computer Science & Applications and Institute for Data Science, Cloud Computing and IT Security) also gave a research presentation at the “URAI Symposium – Artificial Intelligence in the Upper Rhine Region”. He presented his work “Clinical Ready Label-Flip Detection for Medical AI”. The paper was co-authored with HFU professor Dr. Christoph Reich. In his presentation, Dr. Schönle addressed a central problem of integrity in medical AI pipelines − label flipping, which is mislabeled data that can go unnoticed and affect decision boundaries, probability calibration, and fairness between patient groups. In intensive care datasets, anomalies are rare, develop over time, and are often mislabeled, so that purely monitoring detectors either overlook new problems or overwhelm reviewers with false alarms.
To counteract this, Dr. Schönle proposed a triage loop
- Train models with leakage-safe K-fold cross-fitting and calibration.
- Model-versus-label disagreement and confident learning.
- Expert review of a subset.
- Selectively relabel data and retrain the model.
The evaluation uses established metrics such as PR-AUC for flip detection and expected calibration errors and parity deltas for the downstream model. A case study based on the HiRID-ICU dataset shows how this workflow can improve the integrity and calibration of the model with a limited review budget.
Promotion of study programmes and cross-border cooperation
Participation in “UR Futur” directly supports the strategic goals of Furtwangen University. The Smart Factory Cockpit Demonstrator presents project-based learning in computer science and engineering and makes complex concepts such as digital twins, time series monitoring, and container orchestration accessible to a broad audience. The presence at “UR Futur” and the “URAI Symposium” strengthens the university's visibility in the Upper Rhine innovation ecosystem and underscores its expertise in medical AI, data science, and Industry 4.0. The booth and student ambassadors provided a concrete opportunity to present study programmes to high school students, especially those from France, and highlight opportunities for a semester abroad at Furtwangen University.
UR Futur itself is part of the TriRhenaTech Alliance, the network of universities of applied sciences in the Upper Rhine region. Since 2022, TriRhenaTech has been organised as an association under German law and brings together 21 German, French, and Swiss institutions with more than 6,500 employees, 55,000 students and 1,600 professors.
“UR Futur is a perfect stage for what universities of applied sciences can achieve when they combine research, teaching and practical demonstrations,” emphasises Dr. Schönle. “For our students, it was a unique opportunity to present their work to an international audience and see how their ideas fit into a larger, cross-border innovation landscape.”
