The winning team from “MalwareHunter” with their €500 cheque from the PE Foundation.
Students developing the solutions of tomorrow
Innovative solutions and technical skill took centre stage as students from the Faculty of Computer Science and Applications at Furtwangen University presented their semester projects on Presentation Day. Numerous projects had been nominated, and the jury clearly found it difficult to select the best ones. Each winning team received a cheque for €500 from the PE Foundation, which has once again generously supported us in recognising the outstanding work of our students.
The top prize of the day went to the team behind ‘MalwareHunter’, which developed a market-ready USB data gateway. It closes one of the most underestimated entry points for malware; employees authenticate themselves using their company ID card, insert their storage device, and only verifiably clean files are returned, directly to their personal cloud account. The jury was particularly impressed by the cohesion of the project across all levels. “In the end, our scorecards showed the highest marks across the board,” said Prof. Dr Ralf Gerlich. The technical sophistication, presentation, hardware and marketing were all equally convincing.
“CrackJack” was honoured for the highest technical standard; it is a distributed, GPU-accelerated cracking station that cracks password hashes on heterogeneous hardware and demonstrates the IT security relevance of modern penetration tests. In the Interdisciplinarity category, the master’s project “Smart Tool Hub” stood out – an AI-powered application that digitises the process of borrowing and returning tools using camera recognition. “OccuPI v2” was recognised as the most useful project for the university itself; it is a privacy-friendly IoT system for tracking actual room usage.
The design entries also impressed on several counts. In the Master’s category, “Tlaloc’s Temple” stood out – a cooperative smart tabletop board game in which projectors and smartphones merge to create a hybrid gaming experience. In the Bachelor’s category, “Shaping Fear” was honoured – a stealth horror prototype in which the player’s own voice becomes a central element of the game. Finally, “RegioKart” received an award for the best team presentation; this project focuses on autonomous freight logistics in public transport, centred around the logistics robot ‘Harry’.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the PE Foundation (Perpetuum-Ebner GmbH & Co. KG – Perfekter Entfaltungsraum im Schwarzwald) for its support. Our collaboration to promote young talent creates incentives and provides forward-looking impetus. This makes Presentation Day the highlight of the semester. Equally, it marks the start of the examination period at the HFU. We wish the students every success with all the challenges that lie ahead.
Further impressions
