The jury's verdict is in: The winners of the CeBIT Innovation Award 2015 have been selected. Three different research teams succeeded in impressing the jury with the outstanding user-friendliness of their IT applications. In its third edition in 2015, the CeBIT Innovation Award went to the year's most creative German IT developers. The award is jointly presented by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and Deutsche Messe.
The award winners will display their projects at CeBIT 2015 (16-20 March in Hannover) at the stand of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), where the jury will announce who took first, second and third place.
"User friendliness is a special challenge"
The award is worth a total of € 100,000. "We are delighted at all the creative and innova¬tive products which the CeBIT Innovation Award produces every year," stated jury chair¬person Dr. Gesche Joost, design researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts. "Given the special challenge that the user friendliness of digital applications poses to information technology, we take the adjudication of projects particularly seriously," she remarked.
Several dozen contestants
Developers of several dozen projects completed for this year's competition, several of them focusing on the year's special category of "Usable Security and Privacy". The key selection criteria consisted of the degree of innovativeness, design quality, feasibility for everyday practice and presentability within the context of a tradeshow. Oliver Frese, CeBIT Managing Board member at Deutsche Messe and member of the jury, thanked all applicants for their participation. "In the third year of its existence this competition continues to represent a major gain for Germany as an IT location in terms of the innovativeness and creativity that goes into designing user-oriented IT systems," he said.
digisign
One of the three award recipients is Markus Weber, Director of Research and Development at digipen technologies GmbH. In cooperation with the German Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), he developed a biometric signature known as digisign, which can decode signatures based on the signing time, pressure data at all the various points and writing speed. This makes use of normal, handwritten signatures to produce forgery-proof and legally valid digital signatures. It is produced using "digipen technology" – something which field service members, for example, can use to transfer handwritten information from a mobile end device. To do this, they require specially ruled paper and a special stylus. The stylus is used to transmit, encrypt and digitally store the biometric characteristics of the signature (writing flow, pressure, speed). This data can be used to verify the authenticity of a signature with the same level of security as that which could be obtained from a forensic handwriting expert. The "user interface" of the paper signature is thus completely transferrable to the digital world, without requiring any additional user steps.
FOVEA
Another winner of the CeBIT Innovation Award consists of the team of Manfred Ide, Nadine Weiberg and Christopher Herborn, who developed an app for photo-optic wood measuring via smartphone. FOVEA can be used by forestry and wood industry workers to immediately determine the exact number and size of tree trunks, even for very large quantities. Based on several individual photos, the app crates a panoramic photo of the various "log piles" which allows the user to read all the relevant wood measurement findings. Around the globe, wood is still generally counted and measured by hand. FOVEA aims to provide a simple, fast and reliable method of determining the amount of wood in a matter of minutes, right in the forest as the first link in the supply chain.
M
Equally impressive was the work of researchers Dr. Roman Priebe, Lukas Neumann and Dr. Marco Schreiber of Mynigma, who developed the M app for iPhone and iPad. By means of specially integrated functionality, this app encrypts its users' messages automatically. Versions for other platforms are already in the works. M automatically performs all of the tedious steps involved in generating, distributing and managing keys – a task which was previously easy only for IT specialists. M also coordinates the encryption system between the user's stationary and mobile devices, thus ensuring the security of encrypted e-mails in the office as well as on the go. This eliminates the risk of any possible monitoring or co-reading by third parties and significantly raises the threshold for potential attacks. The net result of this user-friendly solution is a more secure digital world.
About the jury
All projects were evaluated by a high-caliber jury of specialists:
Jury Chairperson Dr. Gesche Joost, Berlin University of the Arts
Dr. Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg
Oliver Frese, Deutsche Messe
Dr. Wolf-Dieter Lukas, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster, German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Saarland University, Saarbrücken
www.cebit.de
