News

For democratic elections to be fair, voting districts must have similar sizes. When populations shift, districts need to be redistributed – a complex and, in many countries, controversial task when political parties attempt to influence redistricting. Mathematicians at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now developed a method that allows the efficient calculation of optimally sized voting districts.

This year’s university elections will be held on June 27th, 2017. Called to vote in this election are students of the entire university, if they are entitled to vote, as well as members of the TUM School of Governance, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Architecture.

What and how will tomorrow’s self-driving cars be allowed to decide for themselves? Tasked by the German government, an ethics commission has now drawn up guidelines to regulate these questions. Prof. Christoph Lütge, business ethicist at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and member of the commission, explains in which situations technology should not differentiate between children and adults, and why no one should be forced to give up control of their car.

The start-up Grillido has won the German Entrepreneur Award. The Technical University of Munich (TUM) spin-off has developed a range of sausage products that contain significantly less fat than conventional sausage. The jury in particular praised the start-up's leveraging of online trade and health clubs as unusual sales channels for meat products, bringing new life to a traditional industry.

Today, tracking the development of individual cells and spotting the associated factors under the microscope is nothing unusual. However, impairments like shadows or changes in the background complicate the interpretation of data. Now, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Helmholtz Zentrum München have developed a software that corrects images to make hidden development steps visible.

Three million measurement points in one square kilometer: Prof. Xiaoxiang Zhu and her team have set a world record in information retrieval from satellite data. Thanks to new algorithms, the researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) succeeded in making four-dimensional point clouds of Berlin, Las Vegas, Paris and Washington, D.C. from images stacks of the TerraSAR-X radar satellite. Next the scientists plan to create four-dimensional models of all cities in the world.

Every year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes a list of 30 promising young tech companies. In 2017, this group of technology pioneers included a start-up founded by three students from the Technical University of Munich (TUM): KONUX develops sensors and analytics software which help companies monitor their infrastructure in real time. The rail industry is one of a number of sectors in which this system is proving useful.

Every human being has a unique DNA "fingerprint". In other words, the genetic material of any two individuals can be clearly distinguished. Computational biologists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now determined that the impact of these variations has been greatly underestimated. The new insights could importantly impact advances in personalized medicine.

Hire acquaintances or a grueling recruiting campaign: How do start-ups find their first employees? What makes them attractive when they can't offer much in terms of pay? Does a start-up boss have to hold an impassioned speech at least once every week? An interview with Jakob Bitner, who built the company VoltStorage as a student, and entrepreneurship researcher Prof. Nicola Breugst, occasioned by the IKOM career fair set to take place from June 19 to 22 at the Campus Garching.

Diagnosing malaria has been a very time-consuming and error-prone process up to now. Together with his Dutch colleague Jan van den Boogaart, Professor Oliver Hayden from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now developed an automated rapid blood test that provides an accurate diagnosis in almost 100 percent of cases. The researchers were presented with the European Inventor Award, which honors outstanding inventors from Europe and the rest of the world, for the development of the new method on 15 June.