Innovation & Promotion

Go to the InnoProm project page Out of 36 funded projects statewide, Mainz University of Applied Sciences successfully secured four InnoProm grants. Two doctoral projects began in 2018, and two more in January 2019. The funding period for each project is three years. Prof. Dr. Andreas Garg from the Department of Engineering, together with doctoral candidate Lutz Loh and Tubularis GmbH, secured the first InnoProm project with the working title “Optimized Modular Construction of Wind Turbines Using Precast Concrete Components.” The doctoral research aims to develop a significantly improved precast concept for hybrid towers. The first step involves creating and evaluating various tower geometries in plan and elevation views. The initial result will be a ranking of various “one-piece” tower geometries. Having started with wind energy, the project then took flight. Prof. Dr. Sven Pagel, together with the Business Informatics and Media Management (WIMM) research group in the Department of Economics, doctoral candidate Marc Aurel Schubert, and sapite GmbH, secured the second InnoProm project with the provisional working title “Security-Critical Human-Computer Interaction: IT Security and Data Protection in the Cloud.” In addition to unresolved security and data protection issues, the doctoral thesis focuses in particular on human IT usage in the context of human-computer interaction (MCI) / Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Secure cloud computing is not an end in itself. Therefore, Pagel, together with doctoral candidate Marcel Hauck and loci GmbH, continued the winning streak and immediately had a use case ready: the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The InnoProm project bears the working title “Artificial Intelligence in Media Libraries and Marketing.” The goal is to investigate data analytics and AI in the application areas of marketing automation and video-on-demand (VoD) systems. The digitization of local advertising products is to be optimized through marketing automation based on digital visibility analysis, as are the recommendations for VoD systems. Prof. Dr. Frank Boochs from the Department of Engineering, together with doctoral candidate Songül Polat and in cooperation with V&R Vision and Robotics GmbH, launched the project “Registration of 3D Scans with Hyperspectral Scans in the Context of Environmental Applications” at the same time as Marcel Hauck’s project . The integration of hyperspectral and geometric data is of great interest for many fields of application. Notable examples include, for instance, structural monitoring, agriculture, the environment, historic preservation, and process control in manufacturing. While geometric data describe morphological properties, hyperspectral data provide information about material properties and thus enable a significantly more precise analysis of objects. Particularly for environmental applications and the energy sector, combining these data sets would provide added value and allow for a more comprehensive view of the world and its resources. Through the “InnoProm – Innovation and Doctoral Studies” funding initiative, Rhineland-Palatinate supports application- and practice-oriented doctoral projects that advance concrete innovations in Rhineland-Palatinate-based companies. The aim is to quickly and efficiently bring together innovation-relevant knowledge and business needs in order to develop potential solutions to innovative business challenges in specific pre-competitive R&D projects. By training early-career researchers, the funding program also makes an important contribution to securing a skilled workforce.   Colleges and universities could apply for funding for such an innovative doctoral program by submitting a project proposal that specifically highlighted the innovative content of the project as well as the expertise of the supervising professors. Institutions were also required to secure a commitment to provide university-level supervision.