Saarbrücken Computer Science Starts into Summer Semester 2023

Professor Volkhard Helms receives the Busy Beaver Award for a basic lecture. Photo: SIC / Philipp Zapf-Schramm

To set the stage for the upcoming semester, Saarbrücken Computer Science always hosts a kickoff event at the beginning the term to welcome new and returning students to the university. On this occasion, the Computer Science Students Representative Council traditionally gives out its “Busy Beaver Award”, which honors lecturers who have distinguished themselves in the past semester through their special commitment to teaching.

Around 160 students attended the introductory event for the summer semester 2023 in the Günter-Hotz lecture hall at Saarland University. Dean Professor Jürgen Steimle said, “The start of a new semester is always filled with excitement and we are very happy to share this with our students. We wish everyone a great start to the semester and continued success in their courses.”

The highlight of the kickoff event was again the presentation of the “Busy Beaver Awards” by the Computer Science Students Representative Council. The following courses of the winter semester 2022/23 were awarded: In the category “Basic Lectures” the award goes to “Bioinformatics 3” by Professor Volkhard Helms. The winner in the category „Core- and Advanced Lectures” is Dr. Andreas Schmidt with the course “Hands-On Dependability”. Dr. Mridula Singh was awarded for the seminar “Wireless and Mobile Security”. For the first time, this semester the student representatives awarded a special prize. Recipient is Professor Karl Bringmann for the redesign of the basic lecture “Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures”. With this award, the student council recognizes the work that has gone into the creation of new materials and teaching approaches.

At the end of the introductory event, there was a social get-together where the participants started the new semester in a relaxed atmosphere. The event was organized by the Department of Computer Science at Saarland University.

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
900 scientists (including 400 PhD students) and about 2500 students from more than 80 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Four world-renowned research institutes, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics as well as Saarland University with three departments and 24 degree programs cover the entire spectrum of computer science.

/pzs