First place at the Code­The­State hackathon

HfG Master’s students Lukas Predan and Luke Capo­relli, toge­ther with their team, won first place at this year’s Code­The­State hacka­thon. The five-member team was awarded prize money of 1,500 euros for their inno­va­tive solu­tion, VERA (Veri­fied Real-Time Risk Assess­ment).

The hacka­thon took place on 12 and 13 June 2026 at the IPAI Campus in Heil­bronn and was orga­nised by Komm.ONE, Public Makers and the IPAI Foun­da­tion. Around 40 parti­ci­pants worked in inter­di­sci­pli­nary teams on four real-world chal­lenges from local govern­ment – ranging from crisis preven­tion and disaster manage­ment to the digi­ta­li­sa­tion of cons­truc­tion processes.

Lukas Predan and Luke Capo­relli, toge­ther with their team, chose the use case ​‘AI-supported internet moni­to­ring in disaster manage­ment’. Within just two days, they deve­loped the VERA proto­type, a digital assis­tance system that supports emer­gency services in analy­sing large volumes of infor­ma­tion.

The system coll­ects infor­ma­tion from various sources, such as social media, weather, water level and fire data, cross-checks this against offi­cial infor­ma­tion and assesses its credi­bi­lity using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. This enables rele­vant events to be iden­ti­fied and prio­ri­tised more quickly. At the same time, humans remain a central part of the process: the AI processes the infor­ma­tion, whilst the final assess­ment and appr­oval are carried out by the respon­sible specia­lists.

A parti­cular focus of the project was on redu­cing the workload of the so-called Virtual Opera­tions Units, which, in crisis situa­tions, have hitherto had to manu­ally analyse large volumes of infor­ma­tion. Further­more, VERA also takes misin­for­ma­tion into account, as this can provide crisis manage­ment teams with important insights into public percep­tion and the population’s infor­ma­tion needs.

As the only desi­gners on the team, Lukas Predan and Luke Capo­relli were respon­sible for desig­ning the user flow, inter­ac­tion and front-end. Working along­side students from the fields of computer science and data science, they quickly deve­loped a user-centred proto­type that impressed the jury with its prac­tical rele­vance, trans­pa­rency and consis­tent ​‘human-in-the-loop’ approach.

The solu­tions were assessed by a jury compri­sing repre­sen­ta­tives from the public sector, industry and academia. The ​“HXG – VERA” team prevailed over seven other teams to take first place.

This success under­lines the importance of inter­di­sci­pli­nary colla­bo­ra­tion and demons­trates the contri­bu­tion that design can make to the deve­lo­p­ment of inno­va­tive digital solu­tions for soci­ally rele­vant chal­lenges.

The Schwä­bisch Gmünd Univer­sity of Design warmly congra­tu­lates Lukas Predan, Luke Capo­relli and their entire team on this success.

Photo credits: Komm.One & Maria Kamens­kaya