“Active networking of knowledge, people and resources is the prerequisite for individual success,” appeals Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel. On the fringes of the Changing the Picture conference, we spoke to the Director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering about emission-reducing measures, big data, free access to university knowledge and bringing together talents from different sectors of society.
What new paths is HPI taking in training and continuing education?
Prof. Dr. Meinel: The Hasso Plattner Institute has been heavily involved in the field of digital education for years. Just recently, we celebrated the 400,000th course enrollment on our interactive online learning platform openHPI. Internet users all over the world benefit from this educational innovation – because via openHPI, access to university knowledge in the fields of IT and innovation is free, multilingual and possible from anywhere at any time. Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs for short, are a simple and flexible form of continuing education with great potential. We therefore believe that universities have a duty to promote online education even more than before and thus enable a broad public to adapt to an increasingly dynamic working world.
What opportunities do you see in future media technologies such as VR, AR and data visualization for the education sector, but also for other industries such as health, inclusion, mobility, energy and trade?
Prof. Dr. Meinel: The clear and precise visualization of big data is one of the central challenges in almost all areas of computer science today. Software users, consumers and patients can only benefit from the new potential of ever-increasing amounts of data if it is presented in an understandable way. There are many examples in this area: a team of students recently carried out a project with the Port of Hamburg, for example, in which the aim was to present emissions data. Over 1.5 million measured values from various sources are generated there every day. Data from ship movements, traffic flows and environmental sensors could be linked and visualized in real time on an interactive map. This direct access to complex information will make it much easier in future for those responsible to derive, control and monitor measures to reduce emissions.
Mr. Meinel, you are an entrepreneur, CEO, Professor of Computer Science, Dean of the University of Potsdam, Program Director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research Program, to name just a few of your titles. With the young Digital Engineering Faculty at HPI and the University of Potsdam, the first privately financed faculty at a public university, you are breaking new ground, at least in Germany. Is this a founding model for the future?
Prof. Dr. Meinel: The founding of the Hasso Plattner Institute alone, which has already developed very well for 19 years as part of a public-private partnership, was only made possible by the outstanding social commitment of our founder, Professor Hasso Plattner. This form of patronage is not as common in Germany as it is in the United States, for example. We were also able to take advantage of a special passage in the Brandenburg State Higher Education Act for this unique constellation. It is in keeping with HPI’s founding spirit that we were the first non-university institution in Germany to be granted faculty status. This allows the institute to grow to a greater extent and gives it more autonomy and flexibility in academic matters. Naturally, we hope to become a role model for other research institutions in Germany. I can well imagine large non-university research institutes of the Max Planck Society or the Helmholtz Association entering into such links with their neighboring universities.
Digital Health, Smart Energy, Cybersecurity, Data Engineering – four new Master’s degree programs are being planned. Why these particular specializations?
Prof. Dr. Meinel: With these four new Master’s degree courses, we are building up expertise and research projects in areas that we believe will change society significantly in the coming years.
Take the area of digital health, for example.
Compared to other countries, Germany has a lot of catching up to do here, but new treatment concepts in personalized medicine can improve healthcare for millions of people worldwide.
However, comprehensive digitalization processes are a fundamental prerequisite, for which there is currently a lack of IT experts.
These IT experts must then also have medical knowledge.
In many of the new research areas, networks and collaborations already exist that we can build on.
How important are global networks, whether in research, education or business, and local networks such as the MediaTech Hub Potsdam? What role does the location of Potsdam play for you?
Prof. Dr. Meinel: Active networking of knowledge, people and resources is the prerequisite for individual success. This applies locally, nationally and internationally – we don’t stop at the city limits. Participants in our online courses on openHPI learn within a large, international community. The doctoral students of the HPI Research College meet regularly with fellow students and professors from our branch offices in Israel, South Africa and China. And the HPI Future SOC Lab is used by scientists from over 20 nations. Incidentally, bringing together talents from a wide range of disciplines and sectors of society is very much in the spirit of the innovation method Design Thinking, which Hasso Plattner brought from Stanford to Potsdam 10 years ago. For this reason, we organize design thinking workshops together with the MediaTech Hub. This enables us to promote the networking of individual players from our headquarters in Potsdam.
Developments over the last two years have made the depiction of scanned people ever sharper and more accurate. Virtual reality is gaining ground in the consumer segment. This is also reflected in the growing range of mixed reality glasses on the market, which are moving away from the large, globular models of the first generation towards a user-friendly model. “In three years’ time, the way we consume media will be completely different,” Bliedung is certain. So-called “1st person content” is already picking up speed. Volucap now produces 70 percent of its content for the entertainment industry, with the remaining 30 percent for industrial customers. And it’s not just for moviegoers that new opportunities are being created: Volucap also offers directors different camera movements, angles and ways of using their actors. With the current production, they are the first in the world to use such technology for cinema.
More about the MTH Blog
The media technologies of the future are already being used today – not only in the entertainment sector but in a wide variety of industries. For our MediaTech Hub Potsdam blog, we talk to tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and researchers once a month and tell the stories behind their innovative business models, ideas, projects and collaborations.
