Promoting and rewarding interdisciplinary collaboration of young scientists: This is what the emergenCITY Collaboration Award stands for. The internal award honors emergenCITY publications that distinguish themselves through at least one interdisciplinair collaboration between the various emergenCITY program areas and missions. For the fourth time during this year’s emergenCITY Week, emergenCITY awarded a total of seven young researchers for papers they published in 2023.

This year there was a split first place. Leon Würsching, Florentin Putz and Steffen Haesler were awarded for their paper “FIDO2 the Rescue? Platform vs. Roaming Authentication on Smartphones”. With the participation of emergenCITY coordinator Matthias Hollick, they conducted a first lab study for the ACM 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems comparing from the user’s perspective platform and roaming authentication on smartphones using the passwordless FIDO2 authentication.

The second first place went to Kai Cui, Benjamin Becker, Lin Xiang and Maximilian Bauer for their publication “UAV Swarms for Joint Data Ferrying and Dynamic Cell Coverage via Optimal Transport Descent and Quadratic Assignment”. Together with emergenCITY alumni Lars Baumgärtner, the two associated researchers Burak Yilmaz and Mengguang Li, as well as emergenCITY-PI Heinz Koeppl, the team worked on the optimization of cell coverage for mobile communications and DTN-based data ferrying using swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in crisis communication.

Maximilian Bauer took second place with the conference paper “SUN: A Simulated UAV Network Testbed with Hardware-in-the-loop SDR Support”, which he published together with emergenCITY alumni Lars Baumgärtner and emergenCITY-PI Bastian Bloessel for the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC). In the paper, they present an integrated testbed using emulation in which actual implementations of UAVs can be tested and evaluated in virtual environments with simulation of network connectivity.

emergenCITY congratulates all winners and is delighted with the numerous interdisciplinary publications.