Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of rapid innovation and set to fundamentally transform numerous domains. In this context, we are confronted with significant ethical challenges, for example with respect to issues like fairness, bias, autonomy, disinformation, sustainability, safety, and human-machine interaction. In this Challenge, participating students practically explore how innovation in AI development can be aligned with ethical standards. The focus on ethical AI innovation is especially well-suited to CBL, as it involves complex sociotechnical questions that demand creative, experimental, and interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. The Challenge also provides insights into the functioning of AI, with a special focus on generative models, and conveys important concepts and frameworks from inclusive design theory, innovation theory, and technology ethics. By interacting with a diverse set of external stakeholders, students gain insights into different domains and industries.

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Hamburg University of Technology

Artificial Intelligence autonomous vehicles

Ethical Innovation and Artificial Intelligence

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation

Critical and innovative thinking

Global citizenship

Following the success of the first Everyday Heroes Challenge, TU Hamburg and the Elfenwiese School continue their collaboration to further improve everyday life for children with special needs.

Every child experiences school differently. Some require physical assistance, others benefit from adapted learning materials, sensory tools, or improved spaces for communication and interaction. Together with teachers, physiotherapists, and university experts, participants will identify these needs and develop practical solutions that can make a genuine difference.

Whether you contribute on-site in Hamburg or remotely from another ECIU university, you will become part of an international team that combines engineering, creativity, education, and social responsibility. Together, you will create solutions that have the potential to improve everyday life well beyond the duration of the challenge.

Facilitators from the participating TU Hamburg units form the interdisciplinary Teamcher Collective, supporting participants throughout the challenge with methodological guidance, technical expertise, continuous feedback, and educational perspectives.

**Why Join?**

- Work on a real challenge with real users.
- Experience interdisciplinary collaboration with students from across Europe.
- Learn how engineering and design can create meaningful social impact.
- Develop a prototype that may continue to benefit the school community beyond the challenge.
- Gain practical experience in design thinking, rapid prototyping, and digital fabrication.
- Become part of an established ECIU Challenge entering its second edition.

Motivation letter is a personal statement and it might include a brief introduction of yourself, explanation why are you interested in the learning opportunity you are applying to, any relevant experience or skills that you have, your goals and how this opportunity will help you achieve them, This document should not be more than 400 words.

Motivation Letter

Child with superman cape walking along a street

Everyday Heroes: Innovating Assistive Tools for Children with Special Needs

(winter term 26/27)

Inter-personal skills

Intra-personal skills

Develop an innovative startup concept that solves a real-world problem. You will work in small teams to design entrepreneurial solutions integrating technological feasibility, sustainable business models, and active stakeholder engagement. This open-ended challenge gives you the opportunity to explore pressing issues such as climate resilience, the circular economy, health technology, mobility, and digital inclusion, and to translate your ideas into actionable business concepts.

Expected impact:

The concepts developed during the micro-mocule may serve as the foundation for real ventures in the future, either within or beyond the university ecosystem.

Additionally, the module empowers students to:

- Apply entrepreneurial methods in a real-world context

- Gain critical insights into the startup lifecycle, from ideation to go-to-market

- Build collaboration, leadership, and innovation capabilities

- Understand the challenges of technology transfer and commercialization

Participants will walk away with a toolkit of entrepreneurial skills and mindsets applicable across sectors and disciplines, giving them the confidence to take initiative in complex, uncertain environments.

Innovation to Impact: Empowering Startups to Solve Real-World Problems

Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship with a Focus on Technological Innovation

Media and information literacy

The module is divided into three parts:

- background knowledge,
- simulation and experiments, and
- theoretical analysis.

The goal is to provide a holistic understanding of the manifold challenges associated with communication in Industry 4.0 and how IEEE 802.15.4 standard addresses these.

The concepts learned in the introductory lectures will be directly applied in simulations using open-source software, as well as experiments with a real hardware.

Team-based assignments help you both deepen your understanding of the modern communication technology and improve collaboration skills. Finally, analytical evaluation explains how to compute fundamental performance bounds and validate Quality-of-Service for existing and upcoming applications, turning you into a fully-equipped network specialist.

a large room with many lights and a large statue

Enabling Industry 4.0

Get in touch with Industry 4.0 challenges (spring 2026)

Engineering students often encounter Systems Engineering only in abstract terms. SE-CHOC makes systems thinking tangible by embedding it in a concrete, motivating use case: converting a 3D printer into a chocolate printer. The micromodule emphasises learning by doing, reflection and structured reasoning rather than technical optimisation.  

**What you will do:**

- Analyse and discuss stakeholder expectations and system constraints
- Develop and adapt system architectures
- Work in defined engineering roles
- Model and visualise systems and interfaces systems and interfaces
- Respond to scenario-based changes
- Reflect on decisions and teamwork

SE-CHOC: transform a conventional 3D printer into a functional chocolate printer

Understand and apply core Systems Engineering principles

Circular economy

Experimental sciences are increasingly shaped by digital technologies, automation, and data-driven research. In chemical and bioprocess engineering, experimental data is essential for understanding reaction mechanisms, optimizing processes, and developing sustainable technologies. However, many datasets generated in laboratories remain difficult to reuse beyond their original project. Data may be stored in incompatible formats, lack sufficient metadata, or be documented in ways that prevent reproducibility.

The **FAIR principles**—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable—provide an important framework for improving the quality and usability of research data. FAIR data management practices make datasets easier to discover, interpret, and exchange between researchers, institutions, and digital tools.

However, FAIR alone is often not sufficient. As scientific workflows increasingly rely on machine learning, simulation, and automated data analysis, datasets must also become **XAIR: Explainable and AI-Ready**. This means that data must be sufficiently structured, contextualized, and documented to allow algorithms and researchers to understand how it was generated, what it represents, and how it can be reliably used in computational models.

This ECIU micro-module introduces students to these emerging challenges in **research data management and data literacy** through a hands-on learning experience. Using a biocatalysis case study from chemical and bioprocess engineering, students will follow the lifecycle of research data—from experimental generation to data structuring, semantic enrichment, and analysis. By working with real datasets, participants will explore how well-managed data enables reproducibility, interdisciplinary collaboration, and new research opportunities such as modeling, digital workflows, and AI-supported analysis.

FAIR & XAIR Data Literacy

... with a focus but not only in Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering

This course invites students to become changemakers by designing an event for young people in the frame of Hamburg’s Sustainability Week 2026. Guided by the Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) approach, students will start with the big question “How to increase publicity of the Hamburg Sustainability Week (HSW) 2026?” and collaboratively develop a concrete event concept.

From choosing the theme and location to planning the format, program, and communication, students take full responsibility for the design and organization process. Along the way, they will strengthen their skills in project management, teamwork, and creative problem-solving, while gaining practical insights into sustainability challenges in an urban context.

The outcome of the course will not remain theoretical: the student-designed event can be part of Hamburg’s Sustainability Week, creating real impact and visibility for their ideas.

Innovate – Organize – Inspire: Sustainability in Practice

Developing Strategies to increase publicity of the Hamburg Sustainability Week (HSW) 2026 - Designing Events for young people

Resilient communities

The construction sector is one of the largest industries worldwide, yet construction processes remain largely manual, fragmented, and characterized by limited automation. Many construction activities are repetitive and safety-critical, leading to productivity constraints and increased risks for workers. At the same time, growing project complexity, labor shortages, and sustainability requirements demand more efficient and intelligent construction methods. The systematic identification of automation potentials and the integration of robotics and artificial intelligence into construction processes is therefore a central challenge for the future of the built environment.

Robotics combined with advanced perception and AI-based decision-making offers a promising pathway toward safer and more productive construction workflows. Vision-based systems using RGB and infrared sensors enable robots to perceive dynamic construction environments, while AI-driven methods, including multi-modal large language models, support scene representation and task planning. Approaches towards localization, navigation, and motion planning further allow robotic systems to operate autonomously in multi-robot teams or in collaboration with human workers. However, successful implementation requires rigorous scientific methodology, structured problem formulation, and critical engagement with existing research.

The ECIU micromodule, embedded in the course *Scientific Working in Engineering*, addresses the aforementioned challenges within a challenge-based learning framework focused on construction robotics in the built environment. Students work in international and multidisciplinary teams to systematically analyze construction processes and identify repetitive or safety-critical tasks with automation potential. Based on the analysis, students define a robotic use case and concept, which is explored through literature research, critical source evaluation, and structured scientific writing. The reflective and responsible use of AI tools in research is an integral component of the course.

Building on a literature-based problem formulation and project plan, the teams develop and implement a simulation-based solution to the selected robotic use case. An agile framework structures the collaboration, particularly during a dedicated experimental mobility phase in which robotic concepts are prototypically implemented and monitored. The course is conducted in hybrid formats and integrates participants from different partner institutions, concluding with the presentation of results.

Scientific working in engineering

An introduction to smart robotics in construction

The 3 ECTS project, done in hybrid mode and with mixed teams of students from TUHH as well as from ECIU partners, will be embedded in an existing 6 ECTS PBL class addressing mobile robots under real world uncertainty. The institute has mobile robots and sensors available for use both on water and on land. This year we plan working on small sailing drones. Robots, code, and data from previous field trials are available and will be explained as a basis for this years project. A short lecture series will introduce basic robotics and computer vision concepts and explain the actual robot setups and the problem statement in more detail. The focus in terms of content and intended learning objectives is on object recognition on embedded systems. Object recognition on embedded systems poses specific technical challenges that differ from those encountered on powerful desktop or server hardware. In embedded systems, energy-efficient algorithms and hardware are crucial for maximizing runtime. For applications such as collision avoidance, object recognition models must work in real time, simultaneously (at least in the setups available to us) with noisy or low-resolution sensor data and must function reliably under different lighting conditions, weather conditions or perspectives. The complexity of the task requires expertise from several fields of study, and interdisciplinary collaboration is not only useful but often necessary for object recognition on embedded systems. ECIU students will be part of student teams and work with data to develop an approach to detect other robots and obstacles using deep learning methods. The focus will be on selecting existing methods suitable for object detection on an embedded platform. A key aspect will be evaluating and tuning the methods to achieve sufficiently fast and reliable object detection.

Intelligent System Lab

Explore the world of mobile robots!

In this micro-module, you are challenged to design an educational escape room that teaches the core principles of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL): Engage, Investigate, and Act. The escape room will serve as a hands-on tool for educators seeking to implement CBL effectively in their own classrooms.

Member university

Hamburg University of Technology

Member university

Hamburg University of Technology

Learning opportunities of Hamburg University of Technology