Seas the Day spent 165 days at sea, setting off from Peru, South America, in May 2025. Rowing up to 15 hours a day, they travelled west across 8,213 nautical miles to Cairns, Australia. On Saturday, October 18th, 2025, Miriam Payne and Jess Rowe became the first all-female team to row the Pacific Ocean mainland to mainland, non-stop and unsupported.

Embracing the challenges of the high seas, the duo used this opportunity to empower especially young women, break several world records, and raise nearly £120,000 for The Outward Bound Trust, a UK charity that helps children develop lifelong skills through adventure.

The tale of their Great Escapade is one of two halves. It highlights the challenges faced when their rudder broke just seven days and 350 miles into their first attempt, forcing them to return to land and plan their re-start. On their second attempt, it acknowledges the sheer grit and determination given to keep spirits high when battling driving rain and wind, 30ft waves, sleep deprivation and losing an oar to the ocean. And, it details some of the more technical issues with their power system and emergency hand pump watermaker’s failure and focuses on how resilience and a positive mental mindset to manage these issues.

Seas the Day’s story is a testament to the power of a positive mindset and the sheer drive to continue going forward. The duo will inspire audiences to embrace their own personal challenges and discover the limitless possibilities that lie beyond their own comfort zones.

Operators face enormous logistical challenges when expanding fibre optic networks. The trench network alone extends over a length that is almost equivalent to the circumference of the earth. Precise billing for these massive construction projects requires innovative solutions. Current methods for verifying route lengths rely on on-site personnel who must walk the constructed sections with a measuring wheel. This process is not only time-consuming and labour-intensive, but also hardly scalable given the dimensions involved.

In their talk, Thorsten Nieser, Dr. Sebastian Stamminger and Dr. Tetyana Kyrey will present an approach that uses AI image recognition for the automated analysis of road surfaces and pavements. Georeferenced camera images and LiDAR scans serve as the data basis. A deep learning model retrained by them evaluates the data and identifies relevant surface structures. The solution presented enables a significant improvement in quality through full inspection instead of random sampling, while also significantly speeding up the billing process. In addition, machine evaluation ensures greater objectivity and traceability of results.

The presentation focuses on practical implementation and the ‘surprises of real life’ - and on providing a clear answer as to where AI helps and where it does not.

The Rennteam Uni Stuttgart e.V. is among the most successful student motorsport teams worldwide, having achieved a total of eleven world championship titles. Following a concise overview of the team structure and its history, the presentation focuses on the hands-on development of an electric Formula Student race car. The technical deep dive covers system architecture, vehicle design, and the interdisciplinary integration of mechanics, electronics, and software. A key emphasis is placed on the driverless system, which combines advanced sensor technology, precise localization, and autonomous trajectory planning. The presentation highlights the successful collaboration between students and industry partners in the development of future-oriented technologies and their validation under real competition conditions.

Do you wish you had an equal that can play Counterstrike just as godlike as you? Thanks to recent development in Robot Foundation Models (RFMs), robots can learn how to play video games just like you, imitating your best and worst behavior.

In this talk, Thomas Endres and Jonas Mayer show you how you can use imitation learning to teach an RFM to play arbitrary games. They draw first blood with an introduction into Robot Foundation Models. You'll learn how they work, what kind of data they are designed to process and how that makes NVIDIA's Gr00t perfect for playing video games. After that they quick scope the concept of imitation learning, what kind of data they need to train their Gr00t and how they can collect it from games. Finally, they'll tell the story of leveling up the model from total noob to global elite - one failure at a time - and share all the things that they learned along the way.

Throughout the talk, Thomas and Jonas spray live demos into their slides. To close the game, they challenge one member of the audience to beat Gr00t live on stage in a 1v1.