Berlin Robotics

This Berlin Robotics special features Nele Quast, a community member. She is going to talk about her experience throughout the 48h hackathon. Challenges identified by the German federal government and society. Nele studied biomedical engineering at Imperial College, and decided to specialise in data science and computing. She came to Berlin to work on robotics related topics and accepted a phd in Human-Computer Interfaces at the MPI for intelligent systems, where she is going to start in July. Nele read about contact tracing in the media and wondered how they were doing it. It occurred to her, as it occurred to many, that there are technical solutions for these problems these days. She had pretty much given up on working on it and was just waiting for someone else to release something, when a family member sent her a link to the #WirVsVirus Hackathon on linkedin. She signed up, thinking she would post the idea, no one would respond or someone would take it on. Instead, it immediately started a conversation and within an hour a team had formed. By the next morning (Saturday) they had some idea on how to proceed, and that evening we had mockups and a code base. The team was phenomenal and the network the enormous slack channel created were truly incredible. They had conversations and were advised by epidemiologists, stack engineers, native developers, crypto experts and marketing and corporate whizzes. After submission it wasn’t clear how the project would continue. The team was quite keen but didn’t know what the framework would be. They were also aware that at least 5 other teams had been working on similar protocolls. They didn’t have to wait long: On Monday around midday they were asked to join a collab…