In­sights into En­trepreneuri­al Mas­ter­class

The EMC sup­ports mas­ter stu­dents dur­ing their entre­pre­neuri­al en­deav­ors by a man­age­ment team of doc­toral re­searchers at TUM, while the aca­demic su­pervi­sion re­mains based at the stu­dents’ own facul­ty or school from which they obtain their corre­sponding mas­ter’s de­gree. Members of the Mas­ter­class are fully inte­grated in the entre­pre­neuri­al eco­sys­tem of TUM and Un­ternehmer­TUM. They get ac­cess to work spac­es at the Mu­nich Urban Colab, ex­clu­sive events and semi­nars, out­stand­ing men­tors, cut­ting-edge infra­struc­ture, in­spir­ing part­ners worldwide and a life­long, con­stant­ly grow­ing net­work of com­mit­ted alum­ni. Flori­an Schönleit­ner, a stu­dent of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram Neu­roen­gi­neer­ing, took part in the EMC and shares his in­sights:

“Dur­ing my Mas­ter thesis I worked on inter­preta­ble ma­chine learn­ing ap­proaches for medi­cal diag­nosis. A major draw­back of many sta­te-of-the art meth­ods is their lim­ited inter­preta­bility as they are solely trained on data but lack a bio­phys­iolog­ical un­der­stand­ing of those. I in­vesti­gated an alter­native mod­el-based ap­proach to over­come these limi­ta­tions by com­bining pa­tient spe­cific finite ele­ment mod­els with novel deep learn­ing tech­niques to ena­ble quan­tita­tive, objec­tive, and inter­preta­ble diag­nosis of mid­dle-ear pa­thologies.

From the very be­gin­ning a cen­tral ele­ment of the pro­ject was to de­velop ma­chine learn­ing tech­niques which meet the re­quirements of a phy­sician and can be inte­grated rela­tively easily into clini­cal prac­tice later on. This posed sev­eral con­strains on suita­ble ap­proaches, both meth­odo­logi­cally and con­cep­tual­ly, and re­quired us to look at the prob­lem from not only a tech­nical but also an eco­nomi­cal per­spec­tive. With the pro­ject in mind, I ap­plied to the startup cre­ation track of EMC and lucki­ly got ac­cept­ed. Dur­ing my thesis jour­ney, I spe­cifi­cally en­joyed the bi­week­ly standups in which all active mem­bers get to­gether and ex­change their latest thoughts and pro­gress. The di­verse and vivid com­muni­ty helped me to grow my ideas, ex­pand my hori­zon and gave me moti­vation in times when things did not turn out as planned.”

Text: Florian M. Schönleitner and EMC