Project Weeks
Whether it’s sustainability, AI, or entrepreneurship: many of the pressing issues of our time transcend disciplinary boundaries. The Project Weeks create a framework in which students and lecturers work on innovative solutions to current problems across disciplines, curricula and locations.

Project Weeks 2025
In the winter semester 2025/26, TUM students will again be invited to work in interdisciplinary teams on future topics from areas such as AI & Digitization, Creativity & Design, Entrepreneurship, Health, Social, or Sustainability.
The Project Weeks in the winter semester 2025/26 will take place from 12 to 16 January 2026.
In addition to the TUM-wide Project Weeks in winter, project-based courses are also offered in the summer semester.
Registration is possible via TUMonline at the usual deadlines.
All information on how to offer a Project Week and apply for funding can be found at collab.dvb.bayern/x/3lA2B.
Project Weeks in the winter semester 2025/26
AI & Digitization
TUM Master’s students possess strong subject knowledge but have limited exposure to real-world business operations, company cultures, and practical applications of their skills. 1.000+ bridges this gap: in small teams, students collaborate with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to analyze a real business challenge and develop tailored solution strategies.
Through interviews, role-playing, and hands-on exploration of topics such as resource constraints, communication, product development, and decision-making processes, students gain practical, experience-based insights. The week concludes with a poster presentation and final pitch to the partner company, followed by a joint reflection session.
For more information, please visit 1000plus.cit.tum.de.
Contact: 1000plus @cit.tum.de
For: Master’s students from all disciplines and schools from the second semester onward
Course no.: 0000002563
ECTS: 3
Period: whole semester
- Kickoff & team matching: End of February 2026
- Company briefing & preparation materials: March 2026
- Self-study phase: March 2026
- On-site Project Week (incl. final presentation & poster): 20 to 24 April 2026
- Final event with poster presentations: June 2026
AI at Work offers students at TUM the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied in real-world business scenarios—and to put that knowledge into practice. The seminar is structured into two progressive modules:
- AI for Business – Essentials provides the theoretical foundation for understanding AI and its strategic use in a corporate context.
- AI for Business – Advanced takes things further: students work in interdisciplinary teams of three to four members, collaborating with partner companies to tackle real business challenges using AI.
The seminar culminates in a hackathon during the Project Week (12 to 16 January 2026), where teams present their solutions. Outstanding projects will be recognized and awarded.
Contact: Sara Kappelhoff, Patricia Hornstein
For: Master’s students in Management & Technology and Informatics
Course no.: MGT001445S
ECTS: 12
Period: whole semester, Project Week 12 to 16 January 2026
Students will design and operate a virtual society where embodied agents—powered by Large Language Models (LLMs)—interact within a realistic simulation. Using Godot 4.3, students will build a 3D environment in which agents exhibit socially meaningful behavior and are simulated on GPU servers with near real-time responsiveness (5 to 10 seconds delay).
A custom-built infrastructure for communication and event processing ensures precise synchronization between the physical simulation and AI-driven reasoning. Students will work with various customizable agent architectures, focusing on optimizing context compression, interaction handling, and response speed.
The technical foundation was laid during the project week in Winter Semester 2024/25 and will now be further developed. This includes expanding the agents’ range of actions within the simulation. Interaction with the virtual society will be possible via a web interface or VR technology. Legal and social frameworks have already been drafted.
The final outcome will be a fully functional platform designed for interdisciplinary research—especially at the intersection of LLM technology and sociology.
Contact: Konstantinos Krikis
For: Master’s students of the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, and the TUM School of Engineering and Design
Course no.: 0000003536
ECTS: 6
Period: project implementation 1 December 2025 to 16 January 2026
Hosted by the TUM School of Management, this Project Week offers participants the opportunity to carry out a compressed interdisciplinary Legal Tech development project. At the heart of the program is the creation of an AI-based system for detecting antitrust collusion, using realistic case studies. Students analyze fictional corporate documents, extract risk-prone language patterns, and train a custom model to classify legally relevant communication. In addition to the technical work, students deepen their understanding of the legal framework (Art. 101 TFEU) and the technical foundations of LLMs, including prompt engineering, NLP pipelines, and model evaluation. The goal is to foster a thoughtful, practice-oriented integration of AI technology with legal risk analysis.
Contact: Julius Krüger, Dominik Mieskes
For: Master’s students of the TUM School of Management and the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology; experience in the use of Python and APIs using Python is an advantage
TUMonline module no.: MGT001481S
ECTS: 6
Period: whole semester
The course will cover two main themes: first, it explores how social science disciplines can adopt and benefit from AI tools for research, analysis, and problem-solving; and second, the course explores the impacts of generative AI on society and economy, including methods for measuring and evaluating these impacts. The primary objective is to introduce students to the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, society, and governance from a social scientific perspective. Students will evaluate how Generative AI is transforming society and the economy, and explore how AI tools can be used in social science. Students will design projects to audit Large Language Models through adversarial testing or red teaming exercises.
Contact: Jan Zilinsky
For: Priority is given to master’s students, but bachelor’s students with programming experience and a strong interest in AI may also register and will be offered a slot if there is sucfficient space available.
TUMonline module no.: SOT86089
ECTS: 3
Period: Kick-off meeting: 31 October; project meetings: 7 and November (full days)
Detailed information and registration in TUMonline
Are you aspiring to become an educational technology researcher? Interested in designing EdTech solutions? Dreaming of developing your own AI-powered learning tools? To do so, you’ll need a solid understanding of how data flows into and out of educational technologies—how it captures, reflects, and potentially influences human behavior and learning. Integrating data-driven thinking is anything but trivial.
Data Design Studio offers an intensive introduction to the world of data-centric design. During the project week, participants engage in a student-centered, project-based learning experience, focused on designing data collection strategies for AI-supported educational technologies. Students choose a real-world educational challenge and design data flows for an AI-powered solution to address it. They work independently with specially developed learning materials and receive targeted feedback to support them through each phase of their project.
Contact: Laura Graf
For: Bachelor’s and Master’s students of all disciplines and schools
Course no.:
ECTS: 3
Period: 12 to 16 January 2026
This Project Week gives students the opportunity to collaborate with Gesundheit Österreich GmbH (GOEG) – Austria’s national public health institute – under the guidance of experienced researchers. Together, they will explore pressing questions around data management, data use, and data ethics in the context of the emerging European Health Data Space (EHDS).
The project offers a rare chance for students and partners to engage in a shared space for learning and problem-solving, with the goal of contributing concrete insights to the development of European data policy. It is supported by the Data Ethics Team from the Chair of Philosophy and History of Science at TUM and builds on the pioneering work of the Ethical Data Initiative at the TUM Think Tank.
Following the Data Clinic format—an interactive teaching and working model that bridges theory and practice in data ethics and governance – students work in small, interdisciplinary teams to tackle real ethical challenges and decision-making processes related to data use. The aim is to provide both students and partner institutions with practical insights into how to approach complex issues such as data protection, discrimination, transparency, and accountability in a thoughtful and responsible way, fostering a culture of ethical data practice.
Contact: Dr. Kim Hajek, Dr. Paul Trauttmansdorff
For: Bachelor’s and Master’s students from all disciplines and schools
Course no.: 0000000587
ECTS: 6
Period: Kick-off 21 November 2025; Project Week 12 to 16 January 2026; Report-writing mini-workshop mid-February 2026; Final presentations 27 February 2026
The Project Week examines how insights from the interdisciplinary field of Judgment and Decision-making can be utilized to enhance our everyday decision-making by helping us identify and mitigate our cognitive and social biases. The course explores evidence-based methods to improve decision-making skills and foster critical thinking across various domains, including medical and financial decisions, the use of generative AI, and social media. The practical goal of the Project Week is to design the outline of a program on decision education, able to empower students with the skills and dispositions essential to learn actively, independently, and efficiently, and make better informed decisions.
Contact: Dr. Oana Stanciu
For: Bachelor’s and Master’s students from all disciplines and schools with fluency in English
Course no.: 00SOT10083
ECTS: 5
Period: whole semester
The interdisciplinary project “FEM for FSI with Open Source Software” addresses the challenges of coupled phenomena in nature and engineering and their numerical simulation using the Finite Element Method (FEM). Internationally recognized experts provide insights into the latest innovations in research and high-performance computing, as well as into the implementation of various solution strategies for fluid–structure interaction (FSI) in the open-source software Kratos Multiphysics.
As part of the project work, students immerse themselves in this numerical environment and, working in interdisciplinary teams, tackle various challenges in the field of fluid–structure interaction.
Contact: Dr. Ann-Kathrin Goldbach
For: Bachelor’s and master’s students from all disciplines and schools, especially from the TUM School of Natural Sciences, the TUM School of Life Sciences, and the TUM School of Medicine & Health.
Course no.: 0000002027
ECTS: 3
Period: 13 to 17 January 2026
The GovTech Innovation Lab offers a hands-on approach to the digital transformation of public administration. In interdisciplinary teams, students apply the design thinking process to identify concrete challenges at the intersection of citizens, businesses, and the state, and to develop innovative GovTech solutions. They are supported through keynote talks, interviews, and coaching sessions. The goal is to develop a concrete solution based on a specific problem—such as a functional prototype or minimum viable product (MVP)—and to convincingly present it in a final presentation before a jury of experts. The project week fosters entrepreneurial thinking, social responsibility, and the development of a network between students and public administration as a driver of innovation.
Contact: Andrea Capogrosso
For: Students of Business, Informatics, Engineering, or Natural Sciences
Course no.: MGT001480S
ECTS: 3
Period: 12 to 16 January 2026
Recently, some of the leading, often dominant tech companies – companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Booking.com, which the EU has found to have engaged in exploitative and exclusionary conduct in European digital markets – have been found to have engaged in similar conduct across the African continent. To ensure competitive, contestable digital markets, African countries are considering the adoption of a Digital Market Competition Regulation (DMCR) under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Competition Protocol (CP) Article 11. Some of the leading proposals for such a DMCR are very similar to the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). Whether the EU DMA or some other model best addresses the key challenges faced by African countries in digital markets, and which model should therefore serve as the blueprint for the governance of digital markets in Africa, is an open question that deserves vigorous debate. Participation in this project will allow students to gain an understanding of the distinct characteristics of digital markets in Africa, including the specific opportunities and challenges they face, through a series of focused tech-specific case studies. Students will also be introduced to alternative approaches to regulating competition in digital markets, based in particular on the contrasting EU and U.S. experiences, presented to them in an interactive format, including through a debate between and with EU and U.S. experts. This understanding and exposure to competing approaches, gained during the first days of the project week, will empower and enable participating students to develop, in the second half of the week, targeted proposals for the better regulation of (and governance of competition in) African digital markets.
Contact: Prof. Tim Büthe
For: Master’s students from all sisziplines and schools
Course no.: 0000000993
ECTS: 6
Period: 16 to 20 January 2026
Shape the Digital Future – fairly, sustainably, and consciously. We encounter digital products every day – but who actually decides how they are designed? In this interdisciplinary module, participants develop ideas for digital solutions that incorporate social responsibility, ecological sustainability, and inclusion. They will learn methods of Conscious Service Design and work hands-on in teams to develop their own concept. Whether your interests are technical, creative, or societal – students’ perspectives are essential. Participants will build skills that are in high demand in today’s job market: creative problem-solving, digital design, responsible thinking, and teamwork.
Contact: Prof. Stephan Krusche, Elisabeth Friesinger
For: Bachelor’s and Master’s students from all disciplines and schools; basic knowledge and interest in sustainability, social responsibility, inclusion, and digital product development are helpful
TUMonline module no.: CIT623000
ECTS: 6
Period: 5 practical days spread throughout the semester
In this project week, participants will develop an AI-based cultural companion prototype using the Pepper robot. The goal is to design inclusive and culturally sensitive interactions in which Pepper can act as a social companion. Students will learn how to enrich artificial intelligence with cultural context, consider user needs, and design interactive dialogues. In addition to developing and designing the prototype, participants will collaborate with stakeholders from various disciplines and reflect on the ethical and societal implications of such systems.
Kontakt: Carrie Lau
For: Bachelor’s and Master’s students with experience in Python programming and an interest in Human-Robot Interaction, NLP, Large Language Models, and User-Centered Design
Course no.: 0000000462
ECTS: 6
Period: 26 January to 6 February 2026