These are the winners of the Siemens Excellence Award 2024!

For the second time in the history of the national Siemens Excellence Awards, an audience award was presented in addition to the traditional jury prize: Several thousand votes were received in the public voting. The two ZHAW graduates Tenzin Samdrup Langdun and Martin Oswald emerged as the winners. They developed a U-Net-based deep learning model for the automated segmentation of biological images that overcomes manual limitations. By integrating labeled images and applying Semi-Supervised Active Learning (SSAL), they achieved a time saving of 65% in data labeling. Their approach could reduce manual segmentation time and calculation of Fpol values by over 99.7%, which is of great importance in thyroid cancer diagnostics.

Joel Becker from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland won the jury prize in an exciting race. With his outstanding work, in which he combined the digital with the real world, he was able to convince the jury at the expert voting at the HSLU in Rotkreuz. With the help of his method, natural gases can be analyzed in real time. Thanks to the process variables obtained, systems such as gas turbines in small power plants can be operated more efficiently and in a more environmentally friendly manner. The solution also has the potential to be used in other areas, such as anesthetic and welding gases and in clean gas monitoring.

The prize money of CHF 10,000 will be divided equally between the two projects. The checks were presented by Gerd Scheller, Country CEO of Siemens Switzerland.

The Excellence Award is part of the "Future Creators" program, with which Siemens seeks dialogue with the next generation and promotes young talent in the STEM field. "With this commitment, we support young people in their development and training and help them to make the most of their future opportunities," says Gerd Scheller.