From April 24 to April 26, 2019, MCTS master’s students came together in the Monastery of Plankstetten for the annual MCTS Student Spring Gathering.
This year’s event revolved around the topic “Digital Identities – The Challenges of Digital Data Usage for the Future of Society” and comprised keynotes by external speakers, panel discussions, open Q&A sessions, and workshops in which the students worked on MCTS-related topics. This opened up great opportunities for the students to talk and interact with stakeholders from various MCTS-related fields and apply the knowledge acquired during their studies. Four speakers from different sectors – industry, politics, academia and media – joined the event:
Konark Modi, tech-lead at Cliqz, a novel search engine with a very strong focus on privacy, and advocate of open source community and data privacy
Saskia Esken, member of the Bundestag for the SPD party, member of the Digital Agenda Committee as well as the Enquette Committee for Artificial Intelligence
Prof. Dr. Alexander Pretschner, professor at TUM’s Chair of Software and Systems Engineering, member of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation and the Center for Digital Technology and Management
Alix Rehse, freelance blogger and social media influencer
Another objective of the MCTS Student Spring Gathering is to motivate students to think about new ideas for student projects. Hence, the closing workshop allowed students to reflect on the speakers’ inputs and to outline new student-led (digital) media projects in order to communicate MCTS-related topics. Many interesting ideas were developed and the students look forward to seeing them materialize in the near future.