Technical University Berlin

As industries worldwide transition toward sustainable practices, this course provides an introduction to the intersection of sustainability and Industry 4.0. It focuses on the design and development of innovative products and services with the tools to link emerging technologies with ecological responsibility. By combining theoretical foundations with hands-on project work, the course equips students to understand how emerging technologies — including digital modeling, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), renewable energy, and advanced materials — can be leveraged to address pressing environmental and societal challenges. The course centers on Sustainable Prototype Challenge, in which students working in teams design a forward-looking product or service concepts. Through intensive assignments and workshops, participants apply principles of sustainable development, user-centered design, and technology-driven workflows to create a coherent final project. Deliverables include both a project prospectus and demonstrative materials (e.g., diagrams, mock-ups, or digital prototypes) that communicate the innovation’s environmental, functional, and social contributions, as well as feasibility. Students reinforce their learning through lectures, group critiques, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The course actively integrates perspectives from engineering, business, and design, preparing students to work across disciplines. In addition to gaining technical and creative skills, participants strengthen critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication abilities that are transferable to professional contexts.

This course gives students an overview of how to create projects in electronics. The course covers a basic overview of electronics, solder skills, use of computer chips (“microcontrollers”) to make sound, control lights, and move things, use Arduino and other easy/fun microcontroller development boards, modify (“hack”) existing programs for controlling electronics with microcontrollers, basics of how to make sound with microcontrollers (“Digital Signal Processing”), read a schematic diagram, use solderless breadboards (to quickly make electronic projects), use some tools for debugging projects, design solder boards (“Printed Circuit Boards”) using software (using KiCad), principals of Open Source, patents, project names, and Intellectual Property, skills to manufacture projects (both small-scale and mass-production), basics of starting one’s own small business, and principals of entrepreneurial thinking and hacker’s mindset. The course uses, as an example, a project called “TV-B-Gone universal remote control”, which was invented by the course instructor. With the ideas learned through the TV-B-Gone project, students are then in an excellent position to apply the lessons learned to come up with their own project ideas, and implement them in small groups and with their own projects, and present them at the end of the class.

This course provides a deeper understanding of the integrated project organization and execution models with a focus on integrated project delivery methods like partnering, IPD, or Alliancing. Students learn how the tools and techniques provided enrich options to consult clients and to set up planning and constructions projects in a more efficient and suitable way. The course is a blend of theoretical basic information combined with the application in specific case study situations. Students examine how an increasing complexity of building projects requires new skill sets and a deeper understanding of the relationships of the project participants on various levels in the construction industry. Topics include the traditional contractual project execution models like design and built or design-bid-built suffer on various levels in terms of time, cost, and quality (user requirements and satisfaction) for large scale and complex construction projects and how integrated project organization and execution models have become more prominent in Germany in recent years.

This course explores advanced principles of computer networks based on fundamentals of the topic. The topics are protocol mechanisms, principles of implementation, network algorithms, advanced network architectures, network simulation, network measurement as well as techniques of protocol specification and verification. Protocols mechanisms and techniques of protocols used in network protocols include signaling, separation of control and data channel, soft state and hard state, using of randomization, indirection, multiplexing of resources, localization of services, and network virtualization (overlays, VxLANs, peer-to-peer networks). The identification and study of principles that lead to the implementation of network protocols include system principles, reflections on efficiency, and caveats/ case studies. Network architecture examines “the big picture”. It identifies and studies principles that lead the design of network architectures. The course considers substantial questions rather than specific protocol and implementation tricks, which include internet design principles, lessons learned from the internet, architecture of telephone network, and circuit switching versus packet switching (revisited). Protocols cover network algorithms, self stabilization (examples of routing), Kelly's congestion control framework, and closed loop control on the example of TCP. Simulation, oblivious routing and routing in cryptocurrency networks includes principles of discrete event simulation, analysis of simulation results, packet versus flow models, bounding strategies (e.g., Chernoff bounds), and Gaussian distributions.

This course begins with a study of the most classical objects in algebraic geometry: conics and plane curves. Students spend time examining these examples to develop a feeling for how algebraic equations and geometric shapes interact and prove an early version of Bezout's theorem. The central part of the course develops the theory of sheaves and schemes, which provide the natural framework in which to formulate and generalize classical results. The course introduces morphisms of schemes and their fundamental properties, and it studies divisors and line bundles as fundamental tools for encoding geometric information. Students examine the local structure of schemes, including objects such as differential forms. The class also introduces Čech cohomology, both as a computational method and as a bridge to more advanced cohomological techniques. The course concludes with the Riemann-Roch theorem.