Munich, Germany, April 1, 2017: An interdisciplinary team of civil and mechanical engineers from the Ruhr-University of Bochum won the distinguished prize of “Best Mesh of Technologies” at the 1st German Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Hackathon, held in the Vorhölzer Forum of the Technical University of Munich from March 30 until April 1, 2017. The event was organized by some of the world’s leading organizations in the robotics, cloud, and information modeling business, including Autodesk, Microsoft, Kuka and others.

The goal of a Hackathon is to give those designing, building, and maintaining our built environment the opportunity to collaborate with cutting edge technologies and its developers and designers. The Hackathon is a weekend of geeking at its finest for improving the AEC industries that affect all that live or work in a building or use infrastructure.

A total of about 200 students, academic faculty, and industry representatives attended the three-day event. After listening to opening speeches and participating in several preparatory hands-on workshops on topics like Autodesk Dynamo and Forge, Microsoft Azure and robotics in AEC, student teams and mentors formed and started hacking on their innovative ideas. While a principle of a Hackathon is to come up with prototype solutions within a very short time, several additional and well-attended keynote presentations from leading industry representatives inspired the creativity and motivation of the next generation of engineers.

Before returning home, each team presented their progress to a judging panel on the final day of the Hackathon. Sponsorship from industry contributed the prizes for the award-winning student teams and for plenty of food and beverages during the Hackathon. Eventually, the engineers from the Ruhr-University Bochum’s Chair of Computing in Civil Engineering and Information Technology in Mechanical Engineering (Olga Golovina, Manuel Perschewski, Markus Propach, Jochen Teizer) won the prize for “Best Mesh of Technologies”. The team’s innovation is twofold: first, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) based prototype that gathers construction site data and tracks progress automatically using a wearable sensor-based communication platform called SmartHat 4.0 and second, seamless real-time integration of data analysis in cloud-based building information modeling (BIM). More information can be found at: http://aechackathon-germany.de.