At this year's graduation ceremony of the faculty of economics which took place on December 8, the best bachelor's thesis and the best master's thesis in business informatics were awarded by the Münster-based company zeb.

Markus Oligslagers was congratulated for his master thesis "Development of a Convolutional Neural Network for Image Recognition in Chatbot Applications". He dealt with the prototypical implementation of a generic approach to image recognition in chatbot applications and examined ways to efficiently repurpose already established image classifications to new applications using transfer learning (e.g. to reuse the image recognition of car brands for the classification of vehicle classes, concrete car models or the season in which the picture was taken). In her award-winning bachelor thesis "Gamification by Nand2Tetris", Ms. Troost evaluated a specific gamification approach regarding its potentials for university education. Specifically, the Nand2Tetris concept (see https://www.nand2tetris.org/), in which students successively build their own simple computer, was gamified by Mrs. Troost. Therefore, she re-interpreted the task of building a computer as a game-like activity and  implemented the developed concept as an extension of the Learnweb e-Learning platform used at the University of Münster.

Dr. Christian Heitmann from zeb congratulated the awardees on their outstanding theses, each of which was rated 1.0, and presented them with an iPad in recognition of their outstanding achievements.

The Institute for Information Systems of the WWU Münster and zeb can already look back on a long-lasting collaboration. For example, zeb is a member of the advisory board of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS), which has its headquarters at the Institute of Information Systems.