/ Jana Winkler
FASCINATING INFORMATICS Study Week 2021
This year's Fascinating Informatics study week offered by Schweizer Jugend Forscht (SJF) took place from September 5th to September 10th.
In compliance with the protection concept of the University of Basel, the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science welcomed five students from different regions of Switzerland. During the study week, the students worked on two projects with support from their tutors Carlos Tejera and Fatjon Lala. They had the opportunity to get an insight into everyday university life and find out how diverse, future-oriented, and fascinating information technology is today.
Osman, Marvin, and Kai worked on the “Intelligent Guardian” project during the study week and were supported by Fatjon. The aim of their project was to develop an early warning system for a high-performance computing cluster that sends an email to an administrator when a person is recognized. A sequential code was given. During benchmarking evaluation, 15% speedup in the execution time of the application was achieved by using parallel processes. In addition, the early warning system developed by the group succeeded in recognizing people and using the power of the computing cluster efficiently.
Jonathan and Ian worked on the “Social Media without Servers” project during the study week and were supported by Carlos. The aim of the project was the expansion of the Tremola messenger app that doesn't require internet and workes decentralized and therefore has no server authority controlling the message flow. The group managed to add image and voice message functionalities.
At the end of the week, all 30 participants of the Fascinating Informatics 2021 study week presented their projects and results at the final event in Basel. In addition to the University of Basel, projects were offered by the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), the FHNW Brugg-Windisch, IBM Switzerland, the EPFL, and the University of Bern. And the personal conclusion? Osman, Marvin, Kai, Jonathan, and Ian would recommend the study week to other students who are interested in Computer Science and could even see themselves studying at the University of Basel in the future.