Our MINT-EC Math-Talent-School 2022

Who wants to go to the beach during the vacations these days? Nobody! The new trend is vacationing in space and on the moon – and this is where our experts in mathematics and physics come in. Everything has to be right when the rocket is launched so that it follows the right trajectory and reaches the moon safely.

Such Things Can Hardly Be Calculated on Paper

On the way to a computer solution for this problem, the team will work on the following intermediate questions:

• Suppose we were to launch our tourist at Earth with a large slingshot, can we calculate on paper how (high) it will fly?
• How can we teach a computer to do that for us?
• Can we also calculate the trajectory of the rocket this way, if we include the thrust of the weight loss from burning fuel and the drag in our equations?

A simple mathematical procedure for this is derived and translated into the programming language »Python« to solve the relatively difficult »rocket equation« and land safely on the moon.

The group is supervised by our colleagues Armin Bosten and Tobias Ruhwedel from the division »Mathematics for Vehicle Engineering« at Fraunhofer ITWM.

Since 2012, the German Federal Criminal Police Office has published a nationwide overview of the crimes recorded by the police in the police crime statistics (PKS) once a year.

Now, there have been different so-called crisis situations in the last ten years. Examples of this are the large migration movements as a result of the Syrian war in 2014/15 or the Corona pandemic, which repeatedly paralyzes and restricts parts of public life. With Brexit, the UK's exit from the EU, some also speak of a crisis.
 

Mathematics is Called Upon in Such Contexts!

The team will investigate what impact such events have on the crime situation in Germany:

• For example, do politically motivated crimes increase in »crisis« situations? 
• Did the number of home burglaries drop during the corona pandemic and did the number of domestic violence crimes increase? 
• To what extent does the number of crimes change and when do the numbers return to baseline?

The team will grapple with these questions and more at the level of data analysis and work to model future crises in advance. The goal is to make predictions for various crisis situations that are accurate enough for the police to use in their investigations.

The group is supervised by Paul Weber from the Department of Mathematics (AG Optimization) at the RPTU.

Artificial intelligence is currently on everyone's lips and is increasingly being applied to decision-making problems. But what is really hidden behind the term artificial intelligence? This is the question the team is investigating.

The project is dedicated to the field of reinforcement learning, which forms the basis for an area of artificial intelligence. Here, there is an agent that is supposed to find its way around an environment. It explores its environment and is supposed to learn independently from good as well as bad events that it causes by its actions.

At the end of the Learning Process, the Team Obtains an AI

It is coping well in her environment and is able to make independent decisions within the framework the team has established.. A good example is Super Mario Bros. for the NES. Here, Mario is the agent who is in a 2D world. If you tell the agent that running to the right is good and dying is bad, the it can learn to complete entire levels.

This learning behavior is inspired by humans and animals, making it seem very natural. In this project, the team will learn the core idea of these learning algorithms and implement a simple artificial intelligence with assistance.

The group is supervised by our colleague Tobias Joosten from the division »Optimization« at Fraunhofer ITWM.