At Digital Futures, we are thrilled to share that our former Digital Futures Postdoc Bahar Irfan has received a Best Paper Award from Frontiers in Robotics and AI for the journal paper titled “Recommendations for Designing Conversational Companion Robots with Older Adults through Foundation Models”. This prestigious recognition follows just a week after a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) on her work on turn-taking in conversational HRI with Gabriel Skantze.

The paper, a collaborative effort with her supervisors Sanna Kuoppamäki and Gabriel Skantze, was selected as one of the 11 best papers out of 261 publications in the field of robotics from last year. It has also been included in the Editor’s Picks 2024 e-book, showcasing outstanding research across various domains including robotic rehabilitation, space robotics, and autonomous navigation.

We are very proud of Bahar’s achievements and the contributions she has made to advancing the understanding of human-robot interaction.

Text: Johanna Gavefalk

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly expanding, driving a significant increase in electricity consumption, particularly in countries with a high concentration of data centers like the US and Ireland. While AI technology offers numerous benefits, its reliance on electricity generated from fossil fuels raises concerns about its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

Anna Furberg, a Digital Futures Industrial Innovation Postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, recently addressed these concerns in several radio interviews. As a researcher in the project “Environmental Life Cycle Impacts of Digital Technologies and their use in Society (ELID),” Anna and postdoc Shoaib Azizi, under the supervision of Professor Göran Finnveden, investigate the environmental effects of digitalization using life cycle assessment methods. Her insights shed light on how AI is consuming substantial energy resources, with data center electricity usage in the US doubling between 2017 and 2023.

“AI has the potential to support sustainability goals, but we must carefully evaluate its energy consumption and emissions to ensure it doesn’t exacerbate climate change,” says Anna Furberg.

The ELID project at KTH aims to provide a scientific foundation for understanding the direct and indirect environmental impacts of digital technologies. By analyzing case studies and applying life cycle assessment, Anna and her colleagues seek to inform decision-making for sustainable digitalization.

You can listen to Anna’s perspectives in her recent radio interviews:

For further information on the project visit “Environmental Life Cycle Impacts of Digital Technologies and their use in Society (ELID).

Digital Futures announces a call for postdoc fellows in technologies for digital transformation

Digital Futures announces a Call for postdoc fellowships with a submission deadline on 26 March 2024. Digital Futures postdoc fellowships aim to support talented early career international researchers in pursuing their research ideas in a new research group and institution.

More info regarding the call and application process can be found here: Open call: Up to eight postdoc fellows in technologies for digital transformation

Call announced: 15 February 2024
Proposal submission deadline: 26 March 2024

For this mobility programme, we highly welcome international applicants from institutions based anywhere in the world who have recently completed or will soon complete their doctorate.

Ming Zhan – a Member of IEEE – received his master’s degree in communication and information systems from Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, in 2004 and a PhD degree from the National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Communication, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, in 2013. From 2016 to 2017, he worked as a Visiting Scholar with the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and ABB Corporate Research Center, Västerås, Sweden.

He is a full professor at Southwest University, China, with a strong background in physical layer design, coding/decoding theories, implementations, and their applications in ultra-reliable and low-latency wireless communications (URLLC). He is recognized for his significant contribution to the WirelessHP (high performance) technology with good academic and industry impacts. Most recently, Prof. Zhan has achieved new progress on the GRAND-MO (guessing random additive noise decoding – Markov order), a novel, promising approach towards URLLC. Zhan is a Digital Futures Scholar-in-residence from August 2023 to March 2024, hosted by Ragnar Thobaben, Associate Professor at KTH and a member of the Digital Futures Faculty.

Hi Ming, you have visited Digital Futures as a Scholar-in-residence in the last couple of months. What made you take on this opportunity?

– We wanted to push forward the research on ultrahigh reliability and low-latency communications from a long period of collaboration with my hosts, Ragnar Thobaben and Zhibo Pang. As we use the guessing decoding strategy to address this challenging topic, complicated testing and frequent discussion are necessary. Ragnar and Zhibo informed me that the Digital Futures project can offer us a good opportunity for closer collaboration. For this purpose, I applied to be a Scholar-in-residence.

You’re interested in the guessing decoding for ultrahigh reliability communication. Why do you find this so fascinating?

– The guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND) algorithm is a recently proposed strategy for high-reliability short packet transmission. Their decoding algorithms are usually based on their specific coding structures for conventional linear block codes.. Unfortunately, if the channel noise effects are similar to the coding structures, the reliability performance may be degraded. GRAND is a noise-centric decoding algorithm that guesses the channel noise. It is suitable for any linear block codes and can provide optimal error correction capability for short packet transmission.

The cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes are widely applied in modern communications because of their powerful error detection capability. However, the error correction capability of CRCs is not fully exploited. When Ragnar Thobaben and Zhibo Pang realized the great benefits of CRC decoding by using GRAND, we found this topic very interesting for high-performance control in industrial automation. For short packet transmission in a natural industrial environment, CRCs are used to guarantee the integrity and correctness of the packets. Affected by the strong impulse noise, many packets should be retransmitted if errors are detected. If the errors in CRC-coded packets can be corrected, both the reliability and the transmission efficiency can be improved. To conclude, guessing decoding for CRC is a new research field and has the potential to be applied in future smart factories, which incited us to make a closer collaboration.

What have you encountered in your research on guessing decoding of CRC?

– In our research, we have met a number of difficulties. I would like to summarize these into two issues.

Firstly – how to generate the noise error patterns more efficiently. To guess the noise effects, a long period of testing should be conducted. When the mass data is achieved, it should be processed using smart algorithms. To guess the noise effects for decoding, the noise error patterns are generated from the most likely to the least likely. When the parameters of a specific noise effects family are input, the critical issue is generating the noise error patterns as quickly as possible. In general, the number of noise error patterns is huge. To overcome this problem, we have proposed a high parallel noise-error patterns generation architecture. We are still facing some dilemmas. For example, the power dissipation of the designed high parallel architecture is high, and this difficulty should be optimized in future work.

Secondly – how to evaluate the residual error probability (REP) for CRC using the GRAND algorithm. In essence, the GRAND strategy is to guess the noise effects many times. The packet can pass the CRC error detection if a supposed result is correct. However, this does not mean a packet is valid if it has passed the CRC error detection. If the sum of the channel noise effect and the generated noise error pattern is a legal CRC codeword, the packet can pass the CRC error detection, but the result is wrong. The IEC 61784-3 international standard stipulates that the REP should be no more than 10-10 per hour for safety. When the packet is decoded in a guessed way, the REP is related to the noise error effects, the generated noise error patterns and the adopted CRC-generating polynomial. Such a process is much more complicated than the pure error detection mechanism. Currently, we are deriving the upper bound of REP theoretically. As a primary result, we found the REP worsens as the guessing decoding complexity increases. We hope to get a satisfactory answer.

Finally, how was your summer holiday?

– Summer in Stockholm and Västerås was lovely. Compared to the summertime in Chongqing, China, where the temperature was usually about 40 degrees, this summertime was great. The cool weather, clear water, blue sky, and, most importantly, the friendly colleagues have impressed me greatly. Now, when it is winter time, the duration of daytime is short. I felt a bit uncomfortable in the beginning. But now I have adjusted. Hopefully, I have the chance to enjoy another lovely summer holiday again.

Your scholarship ends on 31 March 2024 – what has your experience been like so far, and what will you do next?

– Digital Futures provided me with an excellent opportunity for collaborative research overseas, enriched my experience for high-quality work, and has built a solid foundation for the next step. We have submitted three manuscripts and applied for one patient. Although this scholarship will soon end, it opened up for future research work, which includes three topics: 1) A highly efficient noise-error patterns generation scheme; 2) Complexity reduced GRAND technique for high throughput processing; and 3) Time-varying adaptive GRAND algorithm for CRC error correction in a natural industrial environment. These works are our focus in 2024.

Bilge Mutlu is a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the director of the People and Robots Laboratory. He directs the NSF Graduate Research Traineeship (NRT) program called “INTEGRATE: Integrating Robots into the Future of Work.” He is the founding chief editor of the HRI section of Frontiers in Robotics & AI and the secretary-treasurer of the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium. Dr. Mutlu has an interdisciplinary background that combines design, computer science, and social science and a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. Mutlu is a Digital Futures Scholar in residence from December 2023 to January 2024, hosted by Digital Futures faculty member Iolanda Leite.

Hi Bilge, your research revolves around building human-centered methods for the design and integration of robotic technologies into human environments. Could you share some key principles and methodologies that you believe are crucial for ensuring the successful integration of robots into various aspects of daily life?

– I believe that a human-centered design must be at the center of designing these technologies that have unique qualities and unique challenges. Specifically, participatory design that engages individuals and communities who are envisioned to adopt the technology to better understand the context of use and how the technologies might deliver value is critical. Finally, intelligent technologies must be designed with long-term use in mind with the ability to learn from and adapt to the changes and emerging patterns in their use.

With your interdisciplinary background in design, computer science, and social science, how do you approach the intersection of these fields in your research? What advantages does this interdisciplinary perspective bring to the study of human-computer interaction and user experience design in the context of robotics?

– An interdisciplinary approach is critical in addressing complex design challenges, such as designing robotic technologies for human environments. The field of human-computer interaction provides an excellent methodological foundation for such an approach. It relies on computer science to explore technological possibilities; social science to understand human expectations, needs, and values; and design to integrate these perspectives within a process. My group’s approach to designing robotic technologies follows this approach, specifically a three-phase design process: understand, build, evaluate. We seek to understand problems, needs, or situations using social science methods; design and prototype technologies using computer science methods; and evaluate the effectiveness of the technologies using user-centered design methods.

Your achievements include being a former Fulbright fellow, recipient of the NSF CAREER award, and co-recipient of the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence. Has this influenced your research and teaching philosophies, and what advice do you have for aspiring researchers in the field of human-robot interaction and robotics design?

– One of the “values” we embrace in my research group is “be the best work out there,” which means that we value quality over quantity and aim for maximum impact. Accordingly, my advice would be to do the highest quality work you can, and others will see the value in your work. I am very proud of the nearly two dozen paper awards my students and I have received, which I believe highlights the recognition and impact of our work.

Your research has received numerous best paper awards and international recognition in the press. Can you highlight one or two projects that you find particularly impactful or innovative?

– One project that I think is particularly impactful is a body of work my collaborators and I have done on the development of end-user robot programming tools since 2018. The innovation in this work is the use of formal methods, particularly program verification and synthesis methods, in end-user design and programming tools.

To this date, we have built a total of 7 unique and highly innovative systems that enable users to program robots using visual programming, acting, demonstration, and multimodal input and to assist, and often automate, programming using program verification and synthesis techniques.

In another project, our interdisciplinary team – including computer scientists, mechanical engineers, and industrial engineers – explored the design of robotic tools to assist aircraft manufacturing workers in tasks that are difficult to automate. We have identified task characteristics that make automation difficult and developed a family of technologies, including new shared control methods, new end-user programming methods, and new haptic input methods, and eventually integrated these technologies in a prototype system that we demonstrated at our collaborator’s facility – The Boeing Company. The prototype system helped workers with sanding surfaces of an aircraft in construction and repair tasks. (Note: sanding applications can be seen here and here).

Finally, tell us a little about yourself. What have you done in Stockholm?

– I came to Stockholm with my family of 6, including my wife, who is a professor of economics, and my four children, aged 9, 6, 4, and 1. Outside my time at KTH, we have been exploring the area. We made trips to Uppsala to visit our friends, Sigtuna, and several museums and attractions within Stockholm. We also tried to experience the day-to-day Swedish life, food, and habits, including adapting a daily Fika schedule.

Your scholarship ends soon – what will you do next?

– Soon after we return to Madison, Wisconsin, our semester starts. I will be teaching a class, called ”Building User Interfaces,” to approximately 300 students, and getting back to my regular research activities. However, I also look forward to continuing some of the collaborations I have started here and staying in touch with the students and faculty I have met at KTH.

Bilge Mutlu gave a much appreciated Distinguished lecture at Digital Futures hub on 12 December, 2023 on “Enabling Everyday Use of Robots as Products, Tools, and Platforms”. Click here to watch the recorded presentation on YouTube. He also gave a talk at the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University on January 11 2024.

Open calls for ISPP Postdoc Projects, Societal Innovation Projects and Industrial Innovation Projects. The submission deadline is 11 December 2023!

Third call for ISPP Postdoc projects
ISPP postdoc projects must have a duration of 2 years. The projects will be funded with a maximum of 500 kSEK/year per postdoc in terms of Digital Futures funding. The additional required funding per proposed postdoc position must be funded by ISPP partners. Link to more information and how to apply

Fifth call for Industrial Innovation Projects (IIPs)
IIPs can be at most 3 years in duration. The projects will be funded with a maximum of 4.5 MSEK overall in terms of Digital Futures funding. Digital Futures provides funding for ISPP project proposals based on the “fund matching” principle. Link to more information and how to apply

Fifth call for Societal Innovation Projects (SIPs)
Societal Innovation Projects can be at most 2 years in duration. The projects will be funded with a maximum of 1 MSEK overall in terms of Digital Futures funding. Link to more information and how to apply

The Digital Futures 2024 Summer Early Career visiting programme aims to provide early career scholars at non-Swedish universities with support to enable short and mid-term visits to the Digital Futures environment (minimum 1 month, maximum 5 months) during the summer months – May to September 2024.

The last day for submission is 1 December 2023.

Link to more information and how to apply