An important goal of the University of Duisburg-Essen is to increase the number of startups that transform innovative research results into sustainable businesses. To reach this goal, it is necessary to connect researchers that have generated promising results with business advisors and innovation coaches of the university who help scientists successfully launch new businesses.
The goal of this project group is to design and implement a web-based tool that supports the advisors and coaches of the university in identifying research groups or researchers that are working on innovative topics. As basis for the project, the participants can apply and refine existing approaches to support innovation scouting that have been developed as part of the GUIDE project. The tool will encompass a web-crawler-based backend that extracts and organizes relevant information from the web pages of the university. On top of this backend, the tool will provide a rich visualization that enables coaches to generate overviews that enables them to drill down into details.
From a technical perspective, the project will cover modern web-based application development using Docker, Elasticsearch, Python (FastAPI) and Javascript (Angular). For the development process, the project group will follow an agile approach (SCRUM) where requirements are defined and implemented in short iterations. From a theoretical perspective, the project group will cover concepts from information retrieval, data mining, and natural language processing (NLP). Thereby, participants will prepare individual seminar presentations and papers on topics related to language models, topic modelling, semantic search, and related techniques that support intelligent information extraction and retrieval from unstructured web data.
The kickoff meeting for this course will take place on Tuesday, April 14th, 2026 from 8.00h to 12.00h in SA-126. The admission is managed centrally. If you have questions regarding this course, please contact Marcus Handte or Arman Arzani.