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Press Release09 December 2020Siemens AGMunich
Siemens honors 22 international researchers as Inventors of the Year
The award
recipients’ ages range from the mid-20s to the mid-60s. The youngest of them
are still students, and the most experienced among them are already reaching
the conclusion of their professional lives and can look back on a successful
career. For example, Jens Braband of Siemens Mobility was honored for his lifetime
achievements. Over a period of about 30 years at Siemens, he has made a
significant contribution to the company’s innovative strength with 120 patents
from 66 patent families. Algorithms that he programmed ensure that all
high-speed trains in Europe continually maintain safe and reliable operations and
enjoy extensive protection against cyberattacks. These safeguards can prevent
potentially life-threatening operating failures and accidents.
The
Inventors of the Year are active in a wide variety of functions and work in corporate
research and development units as well as at the individual business units.
All of the prize-winning
inventions focus on digitalization. Most of them also have, or will have, significant
impact on how we live and work during the pandemic and beyond.
“We all come
across Siemens technologies each day. With their help, Siemens empowers its customers
to transform entire industries. Industries that form the backbone of the
economy. Industries that define our everyday lives. Our Inventors of the Year embody
Siemens’ ambition of driving and shaping transformation. Siemens has been
pursuing this goal for 173 years and will continue to do so in the future,” said
Roland Busch, Deputy CEO of Siemens AG.
“Siemens
stands for technology with purpose. Technology that helps our customers create
more value while using fewer resources. That’s why we continue to invest
heavily in research and development,” added Peter Körte, Chief Technology
Officer of Siemens AG. “We want to focus on added value for
our customers. We intend to do so by asking better questions and listening carefully,
by launching innovations onto the market even more quickly, and by providing even
closer support to our customers.”
The technologies
on which the inventions are based enrich our everyday lives. This can be seen
in the example of Benjamin Pollack and his team at Siemens Healthineers in the
U.S. state of New Jersey. They have used artificial intelligence and deep
learning, which is a form of machine learning, to accelerate automated in-vitro
diagnostics. The researchers succeeded in lowering error rates substantially.
As a result, laboratories now receive significantly faster and more reliable results
on patient samples. These improvements are particularly important in times of
COVID‑19, when laboratory capacities worldwide are under considerable strain.
Accelerated and reliable diagnostics can actually save lives here.
Navigating through
production facilities remotely and virtually, retrieving contextual information
and using apps for collaboration – all this is made possible by an invention
made by Tali Segal, Rafi Blumenfeld and Eitan Carmi from Digital Industries in
Tel Aviv. The Intosite solution combines visualization of production facilities
with manufacturing information and provides users around the world with tools for
virtual collaboration in real time. It enables employees at manufacturing companies
to virtually jump into a 3D model of their facilities, navigate within these
models to access production lines or machines, retrieve information at the
click of a mouse, and access apps in order to collaborate with their colleagues.
These capabilities are of fundamental importance – in particular, when most
employees are working from home as is currently the case.
An
innovation from Chris Casilli in the U.S. forms the core of a Smart
Infrastructure software application. It integrates older devices that are not enabled
for the Internet of Things (IoT) so that they can participate in IoT-based
communications – an essential requirement for modern, smart buildings. A type
of software referred to as “middleware” operates between devices, operating
systems, and the cloud. It mediates between them and reduces complexity. Compared
to other applications, this software can save around €75 million over five
years. It also scales very well: Buildings can use this software to transfer
between 100 and 100,000 data points at speeds very close to real time.
There was
also a groundbreaking invention in the energy sector. It came from the Siemens
Energy researchers Sylvio Kosse and Paul-Gregor Nikolic in Erlangen, Germany.
We all need electricity – every day and around the clock. Supplying this power
smoothly requires circuit breakers, which protect power grids worldwide and
prevent damage from threats such as lightning strikes. Circuit breakers are
used to prevent potential blackouts. Until now, these devices have contained
gases that are considerably more harmful than carbon dioxide. The prototype created
by Siemens’ award-winning team features carbon-neutral operation and thus protects
the environment.
The Inventor
of the Year awards are presented in five categories. The honors for “Talents,” “Design
and User Experience,” “Outstanding Invention” and “Lifetime Achievement” all went
to Siemens researchers or research teams. The award in the “Open Innovation”
category was presented to employees at Siemens’ corporate Technology unit
together with researchers from Stanford University.
Siemens plans
to invest €4.9 billion in research and development in fiscal 2021. In addition,
the company obtained around 2,740 patents worldwide in fiscal 2020. In total,
Siemens currently holds more than 42,900 granted patents.
Siemens
employees reported a total of 5,116 inventions in fiscal 2020. On a basis of
220 working days, this figure corresponds to around 23 inventions per day.
All of these
figures refer to Siemens AG – including Siemens Healthineers but excluding
Siemens Energy.
Inventors of the year 2020
Category Lifetime Achievement
Jens Braband |
Siemens Mobility
Today’s trains communicate through
standard technologies like Wifi and
GSM and exchange information with infrastructure and the cloud. This makes
our travels safe. Jens Braband
and his
teams at Siemens Mobility developed algorithms that make this possible.
Their ideas combine the physical and digital worlds and are used
in all new high-speed trains in Europe. They enable safe operations
and protect from cyberattacks. Currently Jens is researching the
use of blockchain and AI. His goal is higher data quality and even
more efficiency in railway.
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Category Outstanding Invention
Sylvio Kosse und
Paul-Gregor Nikolic | Siemens Energy
We all need energy, every day and around
the clock. Power switches are crucial for a reliable energy
supply: They protect energy transmission systems worldwide and
prevent damage. However, they currently use climate-damaging gases. Sylvio
Kosse and Paul Gregor Nikolic from Siemens Energy
are
working on a climate-friendly alternative.
They use vacuum switch
technology. Instead of climate-damaging gases, they use clean air.
Their prototype is carbon-neutral.
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Category Outstanding Invention
Chris Casilli |
Smart Infrastructure
Get the data out of a building: This is
the fundamental challenge for smart building services. The reason
is simple: Many buildings contain legacy pieces that predate the IoT.
Those legacy pieces don’t communicate. Chris Casilli from Smart
Infrastructure developed a software that is especially good at unlocking
data in near real time from legacy systems. It
is called Middleware Services for
Integrated Buildings, MSIB for short. Through MSIB,
buildings become part of the IoT. It protects customer’s investments
and scales extremely well.
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Category Outstanding Invention
Tali Segall, Eitan
Carmi (in Rente), Rafi Blumenfeld | Digital Industries
Major
manufacturers hold dozens of factories across the globe. Each of the
factories is filled with machinery; they utilize sophisticated information
systems; and they employ hundreds of professionals. Together,
they produce extremely complex volumes of data. Tali Segall, Eitan Carmi and
Rafael Blumenfeld made that complexity manageable: A software called Intosite combines factory
visualization with manufacturing information.
And it offers remote
collaboration tools. The digital twin of the factory brings the right
information to the right people – anywhere on the globe. So they can make better
decisions. Intosite is already a product.
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Category Open Innovation
Juan Ojea
Aparicio, Cheng Tao Wen, Lingyun (Max) Wang | Siemens Technology
Tsachy Weissman, Shubham Chandak, Kedar Shriram Tatwawadi | Stanford University
Tsachy Weissman, Shubham Chandak, Kedar Shriram Tatwawadi | Stanford University
Digital factories produce an enormous
amount of data. Their devices are part of the Industrial IoT and the
data they produce is collected continuously. Here’s
the challenge: To make decisions in real time and optimize your
operations, you need to understand the data. Data transmission and
storage are increasingly becoming an economic factor. In
an Open Innovation project, Siemens and Stanford
university partnered and developed a new algorithm that leverages the
redundancies of big data and compresses the data. This
decreases significantly the cost for bandwidth and storage and
improves the environmental footprint.
(The picture shows clockwise: Lingyun (Max) Wang, Cheng Tao Wen, Tsachy Weissman, Shubham Chandak, Kedar Shriram Tatwawadi, Juan Ojea Aparicio)
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(The picture shows clockwise: Lingyun (Max) Wang, Cheng Tao Wen, Tsachy Weissman, Shubham Chandak, Kedar Shriram Tatwawadi, Juan Ojea Aparicio)
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Category Talents
Daniel Labisch |
Digital Industries
Many of the materials that we need every
day are produced in process industries. Among them are food and
pharmaceutical drugs. Chemical reactions are part of
such production processes, and they cannot simply be stopped at
any time. Deviations need to be detected and corrected early. Daniel Labisch
and his team designed an algorithm that learns the
criteria for a normal cycle of production.
In case of a significant deviation it sends an alarm.
This prevents downtimes and increases productivity. The new
diagnostic method will be available through an app.
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Category Talents
Tommaso Mansi |
Siemens Healthineers
Our heart beats. It pumps the oxygen
throughout our body. The four chambers of the heart
beat synchronously, about 60 times per minute at rest. If
they get out of time, problems occur, and cardiac resynchronization
therapy (CRT) may be necessary. CRT implants send electrical impulses and
put the heart back into rhythm. Tommaso Mansi
and his
team developed a digital twin of the heart. It simulates how the patient’s
heart would react to the impulses and it allows to test different
positions of the implant in real time and could help
the cardiologist. The prototype has the potential to lift precision
medicine to the next level.
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Category Talents
Benjamin Pollack
| Siemens Healthineers
Healthy or sick? This
question is often answered through in vitro diagnostics. Labs receive
patient samples from many different sources. And they often rely on
automation to analyze the samples. Benjamin Pollacks
research
is improving that automation. He uses artificial intelligence and
deep learning, and his findings contribute to the Atellica solution. Atellica’s automated process of
analysis safely accelerates the transport of samples. Test tubes travel up
to ten times faster, and the results of in vitro diagnostics are
known earlier.
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Kategorie Design und User Experience
Afzal Shabaz
Mohammed| Smart Infrastructure Mindsphere team für Expo 2020 Dubai
Veera Venkata Atmakuri, Arun Thangaraj, Mohd Saim Nasim Lari , Padmaavathi M.B. and Priyanka Bharti | Siemens Technology
Veera Venkata Atmakuri, Arun Thangaraj, Mohd Saim Nasim Lari , Padmaavathi M.B. and Priyanka Bharti | Siemens Technology
A size of
4.2 square kilometers. More than 130 smart buildings built on
it. About 200,000 data points connected. This is Expo 2020
Dubai. Its
goal is to be the most sustainable Expo ever and to become a blueprint for
smart cities. Part of the Expo experience is a Smart City Suite App that
brings IoT to life. Based on MindSphere, it connects physical and digital worlds. Siemens
designers
created a unique user experience: They visualized
infrastructure data and took account of human cognition and diverse
cultural backdrops.
(In the picture from left: Afzal Shabaz Mohammed, Arun Thangaraj, Padmaavathi M.B., Veera Venkata Atmakuri, Mohd Saim Nasim Lari and Priyanka Bharti)
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(In the picture from left: Afzal Shabaz Mohammed, Arun Thangaraj, Padmaavathi M.B., Veera Venkata Atmakuri, Mohd Saim Nasim Lari and Priyanka Bharti)
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Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality for more than 170 years. Active around the world, the company focuses on intelligent infrastructure for buildings and distributed energy systems and on automation and digitalization in the process and manufacturing industries. Siemens brings together the digital and physical worlds to benefit customers and society. Through Mobility, a leading supplier of intelligent mobility solutions for rail and road transport, Siemens is helping to shape the world market for passenger and freight services. Via its majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, Siemens is also a world-leading supplier of medical technology and digital health services. In addition, Siemens holds a minority stake in Siemens Energy, a global leader in the transmission and generation of electrical power that has been listed on the stock exchange since September 28, 2020.
In fiscal 2020, which ended on September 30, 2020, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €57.1 billion and net income of €4.2 billion. As of September 30, 2020, the company had around 293,000 employees worldwide. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.