The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic all over the world, and the number of infected people increases rapidly daily. This grim situation motivates us to investigate the spreading process of COVID-19. As the fundamental step to understand the spreading process, we utilize various mathematical models to simulate and predict the trend of the epidemic. In this webpage, the works of LSR (Prof. Martin Buss) and ITR (Prof. Sandra Hirche) regarding the COVID-19 are presented, as well as the related works on diffusion processes on social networks and distributed topology design. All data in our website are from Worldometer. 

Contact person: Yuhong Chen

The technical and technological advances that have been achieved over the past decades have led to a tremendous increase of both the types as well as the total amount of electrical and electronic equipment that is manufactured by the industry. On the other hand, the lowering of the industrial production cost together with the continuous and rapid change in the technology have resulted in the wide spread use of the produced devices in large quantities, along with the continuous need to often being upgraded/replaced. The above facts have led to the generation of enormous amounts of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). The importance of managing the WEEE materials and its tremendous impact on the economy, society and environment is easy to be realized, by considering that the production of common electrical and electronic equipment (e.g. smartphones, PCs, monitors, tablets, home appliances, etc.) requires highly expensive and often rare material types (e.g. gold, copper, steel, etc.). Despite the great importance and the tremendous economic/environmental/societal impact of WEEE management, the current technology are still confronted with challenges, such as the hazardous WEEE materials, human and environmental risks, illegal activities, recycling cost and strict policies. Therefore, a ‘hybrid human-robot recycling plant for electrical and electronic equipment’ operating in an indoor environment for the recycling of WEEE is desired.

Contact Persons: Volker Gabler, Gerold Huber, Zengjie Zhang, Salman Bari, Sebastian Kerz