This year’s triennial meeting of the International Association of University Presidents (IAUP) has been held in the Vienna Hofburg, accompanied by the Young Scientists Conference (YSC) with the theme “Sustainability”, where Smart Factory Lab contributed to.

The presentations at YSC illuminated a wide range of aspects concerning Sustainability, starting from a socio-ecological point of view on one end to a very technical one on the other. Our contribution with the bold title “Predictive Maintenance for Transport Systems - Employing Model Ensembles for Online State Detection”, outlined our vision of how maintenance on a car or an airplane could perspectively be managed. The take home messages of the presentation were that smart maintenance approaches aim at improving both, the productivity of a system as well as its sustainability performance and that methods from computer science, like machine learning, therefore are key.

The conference has been rounded off by an impressing variety of social events – like an opening cocktail party at the Vienna Rathaus, a concert of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz in St. Stephen’s Cathedral and a Georgian gala dinner in the Hofburg – which supported to connect with young people from all over the world, working in research.