The 5th Round of The Orbies

Thursday, February 6th, for the 5th time, our ORBIT Lab community and collaborators came together to celebrate and be inspired by the awesome and innovative projects at The Orbies, Winter 2020. Students, researchers, industry experts and tech startup leaders experienced a wide range of techy products and prototypes ranging from autonomous drone delivery systems, over distributed machine learning solutions for image processing to new keyboard technology for hand-impaired users. Groups with projects ranging from recent startup ideas to Master Thesis projects competed to win the prestigious golden Orbies Statuettes. A highly skilled and high-profile Panel of Judges made up of industry experts and researchers awarded five of the best projects with statuettes in five categories.  During the months leading up to the event, employees and students were able to nominate projects from the past semester that had made a particular impression, e.g. projects that display a high level of technical skills and a creative approach to solving problems. The students presented their projects as pitches, demos or videos and apart from the statuettes awarded by the Panel of Judges, the audience could also vote for their favourite project to win the Audience Award. Finally, the ORBIT Lab team gave out a Community Contributor award in acknowledgement of a special effort in the ORBIT Lab Community.

And the winners are …

Best Pitch: “Luffe”, Henriette Aamand Holm and Mads Emil Nielsen Best Video: “ExcuseMe”, Nikolaj Emil Sørensen, Alexander Najbjerg Christensen, Tobias Aunbøl Best Demo: “Non-linear Map Projection”, Mathias Grønne Best Overall Project: “Drone Delivery System”, Mads Antonsen, Mads Steiner Kristensen, Michael Bro Moseholt, Jakob Grimm Hansen Best Startup Potential: “Luffe”, Henriette Aamand Holm and Mads Emil Nielsen Community Contributors: Consibio, Søren Jessen Kjær, Johan Egsgaard Thomsen, Emil Jakobsen and Thorbjørn Bøgh Jensen Audience Award: “Non-linear Map Projection”, Mathias Grønne Read more about the winners.

Keynote about Humio and Real-time Log Analytics at Scale

Kresten Krab Thorup, CTO and Co-founder of local tech startup, Humio, delivered an impressive keynote about novel approaches to massive scale log file analytics for distributed systems and gave examples of how deliberate software optimizations that leverage the underlying hardware can produce big performance gains. He also reflected on what it takes to build a successful tech startup based on his experiences from NeXT Computer, Trifork and Humio and passed on some concrete advice for future entrepreneurs.    Kresten was also on the Panel of Judges, that apart from Kresten, consisted of:

• Christian Melchior, Senior Engineer, MongoDB
• Kim Dyrholm Kristiansen, Senior Solution Architect, LEGO Group
• Linda Lawton, Google Developer Expert / Senior Backend Developer, SKARP
• Otto Bjerg Hausgaard, Investment Manager, Vækstfonden (the Danish State’s Investment Fund)
• Tiare Feuchtner, Postdoctoral Researcher, Computer Science, Aarhus University

Read more about the Panel of Judges. Kasper Løvborg Jensen, Head of ORBIT Lab and Professor, says: “It is amazing to see how both this event and the community keep growing both in quality and numbers – it is definitely a highlight every semester both for students and many of our external collaborators. The interaction between technology experts and entrepreneurs from outside the university and our students and academics brings a lot of value to both sides – and it helps shape the skills and mindsets for the young people we are sending out to impact our world. This exchange of energy and ideas also serves as a launchpad for many new activities and projects that we will run this year and in the future”

About  the ORBIT Lab community

ORBIT Lab is an interdisciplinary and tech-savvy community centered around the interest in the creative use of emerging digital technologies, such as mobile, wearable, cloud, Internet of Things, machine learning, virtual reality and augmented reality. ORBIT Lab is based in Aarhus University School of Engineering and works closely with other departments and centers across Aarhus University. Together, we rethink the way of developing the creative tech talents of the future and inspire students to build an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset. See more pictures from The Orbies.