Last weekend, I participated with a team of friends at the online hackathon #FutureTech4Climate. This hackathon was organised by the Bavarian ministry for Digital Affairs with the motivation to tackle one of the biggest issues of our time - climate change. Excited to announce that we won a price at the innovation challenge.

As a student at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), I participated last semester in a course called Center Farming. The main idea was to build a fully functioning food computer designed by the MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative. A personal food computer is basically is a tabletop-sized, controlled environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber.

As a data science student and enthusiastic techie, it has been always one of my dreams to work in the Bay Area where so many innovations were created. I fulfilled this dream last summer by doing my summer internship as a data analyst at a startup called Keepsafe in San Francisco. My expectation was to work in a dynamic and innovative environment of motivated people who want to make a change. I wanted to soak in the spirit and energy of the valley and learn as much as I can while I was there.

Throughout the last semester I participated with a couple of fellow students from CDTM at the Tech Challenge of unternehmerTUM / Technical University Munich. The exciting thing about this course is that it is in comparison to a lot of lectures or seminars very hands-on. The goal of the Tech Challenge was to create, prototype and test a solution jointly together with a corporate partner. The whole project had an entrepreneurial touch tailoring the learning experience to a possible entrepreneurial journey with a final pitch of selected teams at the demo day.

I'm very humble and glad to announce that my Bachelor Thesis led to a published paper in the in the special issue  "Sharing Economy and Its Role in Fostering Sustainability: How Trust and Regulation Shape Relations of Providers and Consumers" of the journal Sustainability. As my final thesis our further developed paper with the name "How Corporate Sharewashing Practices Undermine Consumer Trust" is still about Sharewashing phenomena related in the Sharing Economy.

Homomorphic encryption entails the big advantage that computations can be directly performed on encrypted data. This could be a very promising way of processing sensitive and confidential information remotely on the cloud for example. Within a university project we implement Conway’s Game of Life using homomorphic encryption for any operation using the Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (SEAL).

Within the last 7 weeks a had the great opportunity to start the complementary study program Technology Management at the Center for Digital Technology and Management, also known as CDTM. As it is a add-on program it is not a standalone Master or Bachelor degree, but called an Honor’s Degree. The overall program is heavily shaped by the 3 core models Trend Seminar, Managing Product Developments and Entrepreneurship Lab. Here are some thoughts about the first module Trend seminar.

Over the last 2 weeks of Christmas holidays I had some time to return to some of my creative hobbies. Having gone to a technical secondary school with my focus on media technologies and design creating visual stuff has always been quite some fun for me. I especially enjoyed logo design and visual identities. So I thought, why not working on my own visual identity?

Looking back at the passed year 2017 I am transitioning with mixed feeling into the new year. 2017 has been definitely an eventful and insightful year involving a lot of changes and new steps. With up and downs I am concluding this year and looking into an prospective 2018. Doing so I just want to sum up some of my thoughts and experiences on 2017.

Last week I attended the 4th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy (4IWSE) in Lund, Sweden. Within this workshop, the scientific community researching in the field of the sharing economy presented conceptual, methodological and empirical questions of their current work.