For the 26th time, Siemens has recognized employees as Inventors of the Year to honor their outstanding research achievements. The 22 awardees from the three companies Siemens AG, Siemens Energy and Siemens Healthineers are from China, Germany, France, India, Israel, Spain and the U.S. Individual researchers as well as diverse research and development teams that work internationally were honored with the award.
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. 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 Press picture 5 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 Juan Ojea Aparicio, Cheng Tao Wen, Lingyun (Max) Wang | Siemens Technology 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) Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 Press picture 5 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 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. Press picture 1 Press picture 2 Press picture 3 Press picture 4 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 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.