PR Lab Student Team Wins “Overall Best” Award at Nuremberg HackBay Hackathon
NUREMBERG, Germany – June 4, 2025 – A team of four students from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) received the “Overall Best” award at the Zollhof HackBay hackathon last week. Their winning project, “DevHero,” is an AI multi-agent designed to improve efficiency in software development with a focus on corporate guidelines and license management.
The team, consisting of Omar Lotfy, Julian Pleyer, Jeta Sopa, and Lisa Rebecca Schmidt, participated in a challenge sponsored by DATEV eG titled “AI Agents for smarter, faster, and more efficient Coding!” The objective was to develop a AI agent that assists developers in producing high-quality code. The “DevHero” solution addresses common workflow interruptions, such as searching for development guidelines and context switching.
The technical approach of the “DevHero” agent is based on graduate-level research being conducted at the Pattern Recognition Lab, where three of the team members are completing their master’s theses. The core components of the solution include:
- Improved Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Researched by Omar Lotfy, this technique allows the agent to pull relevant, real-time information into the development environment.
- Open Deep Research: Jeta Sopa’s work in this area enables the system to process and understand unstructured documentation and internal guidelines.
- Domain-Specific Large Language Models: Lisa Rebecca Schmidt’s research focuses on adapting LLMs to specialized corporate domains, which was applied to tailor the agent to specific enterprise needs.
The jury based their decision on the solution’s technical implementation, its practical applicability, and the team’s consideration of AI safety principles. The project, developed by the student team which also forms part of the local startup tier0, was noted for its direct application of academic research to a defined industry problem.
This achievement highlights that AI development from within Bavaria is positioned to meet the specific needs of German enterprises, demonstrating the value placed on locally engineered technological solutions.
