The Association of Friends and Sponsors of TU Bergakademie Freiberg (VFF) celebrated its annual conference on 1 December 2023 with a traditional St Barbara's Day celebration and, of course, the Steigerlied. At the same time, the association has fully arrived in the present: This year's keynote speech by Professor Dr Heinrich Jasper dealt with the topic of "Artificial intelligence today".
The association also honoured two outstanding dissertations with the Bernhard von Cotta Prize: the work of Dr Stefanie Walter and Dr Birk Hänel, both from the Faculty of Geosciences, Geotechnics and Mining.
The association members also elected a new board, which now includes: Prof Swanhild Bernstein, Dr Constance Bornkampf, Dipl.-Kfm. Klaus Borrmann, Prof Horst Brezinski, Prof Bernhard Cramer, Prof Hans Michael Eßlinger, Prof Tobias M. Fieback, Prof Hans-Jürgen Kretzschmar, Lord Mayor Sven Krüger, Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Andreas Redlich, Prof Matthias Reich, Prof Michael Schlömann, Prof Hans-Ferdinand Schramm, Prof Olena Volkova and Dr Annett Wulkow. The Board of Directors is in office until 2026.
An important item on the programme was also the awarding of the honorary Arschleder to Mr Andreas Massanek from the Geosciences Collections for his work for the Günter Heinisch Foundation of the VFF Association for the Promotion of the Geosciences Collections in Freiberg, which was founded in 2015. Prof Dr Georg Unland gave the laudatory speech.
250 guests attended the evening's Barbara celebration. Music was provided by the in-house Wood'n'Brass Band and the attendees themselves, who ended the evening with the Steigerlied.