Stefan Klumpp, a student of our course Industrial Electronics, was a member of the Stanford Racing Teams which participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007. For this he completed a period abroad in the famous Stanford University in Palo Alto California. The DARPA Urban Challenge 2007, a race between autonomous robot vehicles, took place on the 3 rd of November 2007 and the team of Stanford University, lead by Professor Sebastian Thrun with a modified VW Touareg called ‘Junior’ was awarded, second place and a prize of 1 million dollars. The team was considered a favourite from the beginning, after it was the winner of the first race of this type in the year 2005.

graduate of our course of study in communications, who was among the winners of this years EADS Science Prize ‘Argus’. He has provided a valuable contribution to an improved calculation of the real wave propagation with his final paper on the ‘Comparison of reference carrier supported channel estimate methods for broadcasting system Digital Radio Mundiale’. The project was supervised by Professor Dr. W. Schroer.

The German Multimedia-Award in 10 categories was presented in Berlin in the presence of about 500 guests on the 21st of June 2007. The future generation prize went to Christoph Lehmann (from the Digital Media course) for his work ‘Intranet 2.0’ which he produced at the agency digital information systems (di), in the framework of his Bachelor course. Congratulations!

This year the Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung CHE (centre for university development) has carried out a university ranking assessment throughout the whole of Germany. As in many previous years, in a comparison of courses of study in electro-technology our faculty takes a top position among the 80 universities. The evaluation remains unchanged with 4 green points and one yellow point.

The centre for university development (CHE) together with the Study Group Personnel Marketing (dapm) have investigated more than 300 bachelor courses in Germany with reference to the criterion ‘occupational capability’. The most important criterions are the establishment of methods-competence and social competences, but also relationship to practice and internationality were evaluated. In the area of electro- and information technologies, our courses in automotive electronics, industrial electronics and communications take a top position. The results were published in the April issue 2007 of the journal ‘Karriere’.

The state’s own evaluation agency (evalag) has carried out a comparative investigation of all the universities in Baden-Württemberg in the subjects electro- and information technologies. A commission of international assessors carried out a thorough test of the relevant faculties in the years 2005 and 2006. Around this time the graduated courses were being influenced by overall adaptation.

The final report was brought out in March 2007. It gives our faculty an excellent placing within Baden-Württemberg. A quote from the conclusion: ‘The impression given by the faculty’s internal report was that the faculty was working in a very efficient manner and this was confirmed by the commission’s inspection…….’

Esther Glanzner and Christopher Blum from the course Digital Media have been granted the year 2006 Webby-Award in the student category for their work 4187-Chicago-Architecture. The commemorative prize presentation was on the 12th of June 2006 in New York. The Webby-Award, which was awarded 2006 for the 10th time by the ‘International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences’, is recognised as the most coveted prize and is treated as the Oscar of the internet. It is awarded in 65 categories in which two prizes can be won in each category. In 2006, over 5,000 projects from more than 40 countries were presented.