And the winners are … Telekom announces winners of Telekom Challenge

• Jeannine Born (TU Dresden) together with Amr Osman (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Jisung Oh from PHYTunes impressed with their concepts for secure home networking of tomorrow 
• 180 ideas, 35 countries and five continents 
• New challenge on XR (augmented reality) starts on October 15

With their innovative ideas for secure data distribution in tomorrow's home networks, Jeannine Born with her team member Amr Osman and Jisung Oh with the entire team at PHYTunes convinced the jury and won the Telekom Challenge, the science competition of T-Labs, out of 180 worldwide entries. 

Jeannine Born and Amr Osman received the first prize of 150,000 euros in the "Development Stream" for their idea for "automatic network isolation of IoT devices." The software and edge cloud architecture they developed identifies all IoT devices in a network. A risk score is assigned for each device and devices with a high security risk are automatically grouped into fully isolated segments. This protects them from Mirai-like malware infections as well as malicious IoT devices. Born and Osman demonstrated the viability of the idea in a proof of concept (PoC).

In the "research stream," Jisung Oh, CEO of PHYTunes, impressed with his approach of a "wireless-wireline converged architecture" as a supporting approach to Wi-Fi and 5G. 

In his research he describes a novel approach for such a converged architecture that reuses the existing wireline infrastructure to carry wireless signals and thereby improve delivery of 5G/Wi-Fi indoors. He will receive prize money of 75,000 euros. 

"I am delighted with the high quality of the ideas submitted. This did not make the jury's decision easy. We received applications mainly from academic staff or students at relevant universities, but also from startups. This proves the attractiveness of the “Telekom Challenge” as well as the good networking of Deutsche Telekom. As Telekom, we will continue to pursue some of the approaches and test their practical suitability," explains Claudia Nemat, Member of the Board of Management for Technology and Innovation at Deutsche Telekom.

More award winners 

Second and third places were awarded to these ideas:

• "Development Stream"
  The second place, with prize money of 100,000 euros, went to Mate Tömösközl and Maroua Taghouti from the Technical University of Dresden with their “bitteiler” idea. The two developed a demonstration with more than 18 IoT devices. They show the previously untapped potential of integrated in-network compression and coding.
  Third place winners were Olaf Kehrer and Daniel Lucani from Aarhus University and O&O Software GmbH. The two developed an "Edge Cloud@Home". A cloud setup for home networks, protecting user privacy. Designed to secure data for storage and backup on site, the solution allows users to access their data anytime by its reliance on a set of independent cloud providers and locations selected by the customer. The two will receive prize money of 50,000 euros.
• "Research stream"
  Second place, with prize money of 50,000 euros, went to Michael Rademacher and Thorsten Horstmann from Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. In their research paper, they discuss the use of 5G campus networks in home networks.
  Third place, with prize money of 25,000 euros, was awarded to Kai Grunert from TU Berlin for his idea of uninterruptible smart home processes. These smart home processes will still work if the connection to the Internet breaks down or if the involved cloud systems crash.

Great interest from the research community worldwide

This first edition of the Telekom Challenge met with great interest worldwide. Around 180 ideas from 35 countries and five continents were submitted. 

The jury, chaired by Alexander Lautz, Head of T-Labs, was interdisciplinary and included external members such as Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert, Head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) and Chair of Security in Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich, Dr. Irene Fialka CEO of INiTS and Managing Director Health Hub Vienna, as well as representatives from Telekom.

Science competition enters second edition

T-Labs, Telekom's research and development unit, launched its international science competition, the Telekom Challenge, this year. The second edition of the Telekom Challenge will start mid-October. It will focus on questions relating to XR, i.e. the possibilities of augmented reality. It is also aimed specifically at the brightest minds in the national and international research community, whether at universities, research centers or in the corporate and startup environment.

More information about the Telekom Challenge is available at telekom-challenge.com.

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