February 21st, ORBIT Lab, Aarhus University School of Engineering’s innovation and tech lab, gathered more than 100 students, staff and representatives from the industry for the award ceremony event The Orbies. Here, engineering students presented their projects from the past semester, and a panel of judges from the industry awarded Orbie statuettes to the best projects.
Leading up to the event, staff and students were able to nominate projects from the past semester that had made a particular impression – e.g. projects with a high level of technical accomplishment and a creative solution to a problem. The nominees could choose to present their project in one or more of the categories: Best Video, Best Demo or Best Pitch. Besides these three categories, the projects could also win awards in the categories: Best Startup Potential and Best Overall Project. Finally, the audience voted for their favorite project to win the Audience Award and the ORBIT Lab team presented the Community Contributor Award given in recognition of a special contribution to the ORBIT Lab Community.
Here are the winners:
Best Pitch: Aarhus Harbour Bath – Rasmus Hemmingsen, Nicklas Nielsen and Anders Meidahl
Best Video: pUber – Kasper Svendsen and Frederik Winther
Best Demo: Card2Phone: Jakob Halskov Stevnsner and Nanna Friis
Best Overall Project: Aarhus Harbour Bath – Rasmus Hemmingsen, Nicklas Nielsen and Anders Meidahl
Best Startup Potential: Scavenger Hunt – Luise Sørensen, Tobias Henriksen and Jacob Kurzhals
Audience Award: HelpTogether – Nikolai Topping and Anders Knudsen
Community Contributor: Jacob Aagaard
Read more about the winners.
An impressed judge from Microsoft
Keynote speaker, Sherry List, who is Azure Developer Technical Lead at Microsoft, inspired the audience by taking them on a journey into the DNA of web components, providing examples of their use in the Angular ecosystem. Her keynote included demos and code for how to build and deploy reusable web components that work across all modern web browsers.
Sherry List says about her Orbies experience:
“I like how ORBIT Lab encourages students to present their projects. It is a valuable skill to complement their technical knowledge. I was delighted and honored to be invited to The Orbies to be Keynote Speaker and part of the panel of judges. I haven’t been to The Orbies before, so I was not sure what to expect. What I experienced on the nights was an extremely well-planned and inspiring event, and I was really impressed with the projects presented by the students.”
The Panel of Judges
Besides Sherry List, the Panel of Judges comprised Bo Fristed, Head of ITK at the City of Aarhus, Johan Abildskov, Continuous Delivery Consultant at Praqma, Kasper Nissen, Cloud Architect at Lunar Way, Michael Thomsen, Product Manager at Google and Nick Nielsen, IoT Requirement Specialist at Grundfos. Read more about the judges.
After extensive deliberation, the panel agreed on a winning project for each of the categories: Best Pitch, Best Video, Best Demo, Best Startup Potential and Best Overall Project.
“In ORBIT Lab, we are privileged to have a supportive community of tech companies, startups and other external organizations that make it possible for us to bridge the gap between real-world problems and best practice from industry and the theoretical foundation that students get from the university. With this network, we are adding an extra dimension to student life and create a unique platform for experimenting with the newest digital technologies and cutting-edge research. And The Orbies is part of that. We want to make sure that – on top of technical skills – our students are capable of telling the world about their solutions.” says the leader of ORBIT Lab, Kasper Løvbog Jensen, Professor (docent) at the Aarhus University School of Engineering.
The next installment of The Orbies will take place in September. To receive an invitation, sign up for the ORBIT Lab newsletter.