ZHAW digital funds seven additional projects as part of the “Digital Futures Fund”
Seven new projects were selected by ZHAW digital in the third and final award date in 2021 and will receive up to CHF 20’000 in funds.
The "Digital Futures Fund" (DFF) is aimed at all ZHAW employees who want to develop or test an innovative idea in the field of digital transformation. In 2021, 21 projects were already selected in the first two rounds of awards, and seven more are now being added. "We announced the DFF for the first time in 2020 and were able to fund 27 projects. We are pleased to have received many applications again in 2021 and to be able to fund a total of 28 projects," says Daniel Baumann, Head of the strategic initiative ZHAW digital. ZHAW employees can apply for funding for the coming year starting in fall 2021.
This year, for the first time, the Digital Futures Lab community was involved in the selection process. That means, from the submitted projects that met the formal requirements, Digital Futures Lab members selected the eligible projects via voting. "The discussions and valuable feedback on the design of the DFF selection process showed that selecting projects for funding is not easy," Baumann says. "We thank our community members for their support and will take the feedback into account when designing the next call."
Automating tedious and repetitive tasks
In teaching and continuing education as well as in finance and services, ZHAW employees from the President’s Office to the institutes and centres are confronted with tedious and repetitive activities. In most modules, for example, all grades are entered by hand from an Excel file into Evento at the end of the semester. And even in R&D projects, there are repetitive activities such as data preparation. Björn Scheppler from the ZHAW School of Management and Law wants to use his DFF project to investigate which activities Robotic Process Automation (RPA) could take away from us and which prerequisites need to be created for this to succeed.
The ZHAW information platform for health apps.
Mobile apps are becoming increasingly important in healthcare. However, in this dynamic market, there is a lack of independent overview and evaluation of products, especially on key issues such as measurement accuracy or data protection. The project of Eveline Graf from the ZHAW School of Health Professions bundles this broad expertise and will create a concept for the construction, operation and further development of a website on which an independent assessment of health apps will be made available to the public in an understandable way.
Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics in Structural Design
In an interdisciplinary approach between the fields of Architecture, Digital Fabrication, and Data Science, David Jenny of the ZHAW School of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering aims to use machine learning algorithms to model the dependencies between the input parameters of the fabrication process and the resulting output geometry of produced artefacts, thus allowing for a prediction. The data collection method is unique - instead of a digital simulation, the physical prototypes produced by a digitally con-trolled fabrication process are scanned - and our model learns directly from the real world.