About the project

Objective
This project advocates a paradigm shift in the development of CPS by proposing a secure-by-construction controller synthesis scheme that considers security properties simultaneously with safety ones during the design phase. To successfully overcome the design challenges encountered in large-scale CPS under complex security requirements, we aim to develop a compositional and automated secure-by-construction design process based on a cross-disciplinary approach combining theoretical techniques from computer science (e.g. assume-guarantee rules) with those from control theory (e.g. small-gain theorems). This project aims to bring a potential solution to the fundamental security issue for the smart society vision by enabling cost-efficient and reliable design for CPS with formal security guarantees.

Background
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are the technological backbone of the increasingly interconnected and smart world where design faults or security vulnerabilities can be catastrophic. Self-driving cars, wearable and implantable medical devices, smart buildings, and critical infrastructure are some high-profile examples that underscore modern CPS’s security and safety concerns. In the last decades, safety concerns have received considerable attention in the design of CPS, while security analysis is left as an afterthought for later stages. This paradigm results in a costly and lengthy development process due to high-security validation costs. We believe that the security considerations should be elevated as primary design drivers and safety ones to tackle the design challenge of modern CPS.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Siyuan Liu is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Division of Decision and Control Systems at KTH. Before joining KTH, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Informatics at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany, from 2019 to 2022. She received her B.E. degree in Automation Science in 2014 and her M.E. in Control Engineering in 2017 from Beihang University, China. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, in 2022. Her research interests include safety and security in cyber-physical systems, compositional analysis of large-scale hybrid systems, and automated verification and control of nonlinear control systems.

Main supervisor
Dimos Dimarogonas, KTH

Co-supervisor
Marco Molinari, KTH
Jana Tumova, KTH

Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event.

About the project

Objective
My research investigates children and digitalization for more sustainable futures. It draws upon feminist ethics of care and more-than-human theories of collaborative survival to examine new technology roles in and for multi-species flourishing. This will be done through design-based activities (i.e., research-through-design) that will be situated around topics such as human-waste relations, local ecosystems, and nature appreciation.

Background
This research is motivated by a concern for a damaged environment and is oriented towards children as inhabitants and caretakers of its future. It is significant for the following reasons. Firstly, its focus on children is significant in considering new paradigms of digital tools and the long-term role of digitalization in everyday life. Secondly, its relational grounding within theories of care provides a lens to consider humans as interconnected with non-humans, which is important in developing an understanding of designing with distributed and networked digital materials.

Thirdly, its emphasis on nature as critical to the health and well-being of all species situates an important and often overlooked context for digitalization, which is significant in responsibly expanding digital interactions into the outdoors and nonurban environments.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Karey Helms is an interaction designer and design researcher at KTH. Her PhD research draws upon care ethics and posthuman feminism to investigate how interaction design might be otherwise amid a world in crisis. This includes ongoing interests in living materials, human bodily fluids, and ontological design. She implicates herself and unsettles bodily boundaries for a more careful technology design through autoethnographic and speculative design methods. Link to the website of Karey Helms

Main supervisor
Airi Lampinen, SU

Co-supervisor
Meike Schalk, KTH

Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event.

About the project

Objective
This research aims to develop network monitoring technologies that provide deep, real-time insights into network activity. It focuses on designing in-hardware algorithms and tailored analysis tools to detect and analyze critical factors, including security intrusions, network anomalies, and root causes of failures.

Background
Computer networks are vital to the operation of modern industries and society. Failures and security breaches can range from costly inconveniences to catastrophes. For this reason, networks are continuously monitored to ensure reliability.

Unfortunately, the high speeds of modern networks make comprehensive monitoring difficult, leaving blind spots that hinder effective analysis. Achieving fine-grained, real-time traffic analysis could transform how intrusions are detected and failures are mitigated, enabling faster responses and enhancing network resilience.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Jonatan Langlet is a researcher with expertise in on-hardware monitoring algorithms and data structures. He earned his PhD in computer science from Queen Mary University of London, during which he focused on high-speed data collection, probabilistic streaming data analysis, and in-network artificial intelligence. His research interests span network programmability, systems, and algorithms, particularly on real-world deployability.

Main supervisor
Marco Chiesa, Associate Professor, Division of Software and Computer Systems, KTH.

Co-supervisor
Dejan Kostić, Professor, Division of Software and Computer Systems, KTH.

About the project

Objective
This project aims to produce the first set of design guidelines for developing digital social touch-haptic stimuli generated by technology that is capable of communicating social content. It aims to engage an experience-driven paradigm to study the building blocks of a digital social touch that is sensorially precise, socially recognisable and validated in a naturalistic environment, resulting in its intended social content being successfully recognised by the human recipient.

It will register social touch’s experiential and situational qualities in design terms and according to technical and numerical parameters that can be employed by the wider haptic design community, including computer scientists, roboticists and product designers. It will employ soft robotic actuators for their sensorially rich potential.

Background
Social touch is the most effective form of non-verbal communication, commonly used for greeting, reassurance, building a sense of togetherness, and conveying affection. The growing use of touch-enabled agents and robots for healthcare, teaching, and applications for telepresence calls for convincing digital touch that are capable of communicating social content. However, there are no existing guidelines for designing digital social touch. In real life, experiential factors such as the appearance and texture of the touch actuator material, contextual factors such as how and when the touch is introduced, where it is positioned on the body, and cultural and social backgrounds define how the human recipient perceives touch.

However, these factors have been mostly excluded when designing digital social touch within the technical community due to the limitation of a task-oriented design paradigm and the lack of access to tools and methods to engage the experiential qualities of social touch. This project will take several steps to address this gap and produce a design guide, a demonstratable prototype, and an open dataset.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Caroline Yan Zheng is a designer and researcher who works on creating embedded, tangible interfaces using soft robotics that enable emotionally rich experiences, with a PhD from the Royal College of Art UK. Her past work included developing an affect-, material-, and interaction-led (AMI-led) design framework to guide the form-giving process for affect-enabling interactive artefacts. Specifically, combining findings from neuroscience on comforting touch (CT-optimal touch) and the unique sensory qualities of tactile soft robotics, she developed and validated a wearable device (S-CAT) that simulates a gentle stroking touch.

She was an awardee of the MedTech SuperConnector programme in the UK for translating soft robotic haptic technology into healthcare applications and a co-investigator in the Cancer Research UK-funded project ‘Improving care through soft robotic tactile intervention – towards a smarter compassionate experience in cancer treatment (SOFTLI)’ (2019-2021). She believes that technologies that afford physical experience are the next wave of our digital futures. For this vision, she is also a passionate community builder. She has initiated and co-organised several international workshops on affective HRI and has guest edited a Special Issue on ‘Designing the robot body: critical perspectives on affective embodied interaction’, published in the Journal of Transactions in Human-Robot Interaction (THRI).

Main supervisor
Madeline Balaam, Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Designs at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Co-supervisor
Anna Ståhl, Senior Researcher, Digital Systems, RISE

About the project

Objective
Aligning with the Digital Futures call for a “rich and healthy life,” this research will explore designing for collective caring as the core of the next generation Femtech for menstrual and reproductive wellbeing. Using a cross-cultural approach (Sweden and India), the objective is to investigate what it means to nurture trust and cooperation when engaging menstruators with parents and/or partners to digitalize collective caring for intimate health. Here, it is crucial to acknowledge that the conventional methodological approach to participant recruitment and data collection inadequately addresses the stigma and language barriers inherent in the taboo nature of the topic.

Thus, using a qualitative method and participatory design approach, this research will explore assets of culture and heritage for crafting appropriate methods and designing Femtech to navigate taboos and build trust for facilitating a dialogue on the sensitive topic of intimate health and wellbeing. The motivation to undertake this research stems from a commitment to fostering equitable and period-positive futures where menstruating bodies are not stigmatized or seen as needing control, discipline, or fixing.

Background
Menstruation is a biological phenomenon experienced by millions of individuals daily around the globe, where varied stakeholders in a menstruator’s vicinity shape these experiences. Throughout the reproductive journey (menarche to menopause), parents and partners play pivotal roles in a menstruator’s life. In certain scenarios and contexts, the decision-making and/or financial power may be disproportionately in the hands of these two stakeholders. Thus, focusing on menstruators’ intimate health and well-being, it becomes imperative to expand the contemporary personal informatics approach to design Femtech by taking an ecological approach focusing on interpersonal cooperation to ideate, design, and implement Femtech.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
As a qualitative researcher and interaction designer, Anupriya Tuli focuses on understanding and designing technology experiences toward just and equitable futures. Her research is situated at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), global health, taboo subjects, marginalization, and activism. She frequently engages with feminist perspectives, aiming to design socially responsible technologies that target health equity, focusing on women’s health, well-being, and empowerment.

She completed her PhD in Human-Centered Design at IIIT-Delhi, India, where she delved into the design of digital menstrual technologies to uncover how technology design can effectively address cultural taboos and systemic barriers to nurture positive menstrual experiences.  She received fellowships from the Indian Government and Google to support her doctoral research. In addition to her academic endeavours, she is deeply involved in collaborative efforts with practitioners and non-governmental organizations in India, particularly focusing on initiatives related to menstrual health and well-being.

Main supervisor
Madeline Balaam, Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Designs at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Co-supervisor
Airi Lampinen, Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University

About the project

Objective
This research will develop design considerations and policy recommendations for designing with and applying (inter)personal and intimate data. The project will follow a participatory approach centered around people’s experiences interacting with and sharing intimate technologies that collect and store (inter)personal data.

Background
In today’s digital society, most people routinely interact with connected products and services that collect and indefinitely store personal data. Increasingly, these products and services — and the data they produce — permeate intimate spaces, such as smart vibrators collecting sensor data about people’s arousal and orgasm, and AI romance chatbots collecting self-reported information about people’s mental and sexual health. Moreover, these intimate spaces are often shared and relational. For instance, a connected voice assistant in a shared household collects data from the primary user, other household members, and even occasional visitors. Thus, data becomes both intimate and (inter)personal, shaped by and shared across (inter)personal relationships around shared experiences and spaces.

These characteristics raise critical questions for data, design, and policy. Although connected intimate technologies — and the data they produce — are often designed for individual use(rs), their use is often shared and relational: How can we design intimate technologies that empower their users to care for and share their data? Similarly, regulations such as the GDPR established several rights to empower individuals to control their data, such as the right to access: Who should access (inter)personal data?

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Alejandra Gómez Ortega is a Design and Human-Computer Interaction researcher. She holds a PhD in Industrial Design Engineering from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. Her research investigates individual experiences interacting with and sharing intimate data, privacy perceptions and considerations around data, and data themselves through playful and creative approaches. Alejandra has applied various methods and approaches in her design research journey, including Participatory Design and Research through Design. Alejandra enjoys designing, developing, deploying, and exhibiting provocative artifacts and digital prototypes that enable individuals and communities to experience a specific situation as a starting point for reflection and discussion.

Main supervisor
Airi Lampinen, Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University.

Co-supervisor
Madeline Balaam, Professor, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Designs, KTH.

About the project

The SHARCEX project focuses on improving underwater operations by integrating advanced autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with human divers. The goal is to enhance safety and efficiency in extreme underwater environments such as defense, rescue operations, and law enforcement.

Key technologies being developed and integrated include:

The project progresses through multiple phases:

  1. Development of AI models
  2. System integration
  3. User interface design
  4. Operational testing

KTH leads the project in collaboration with FMV and Saab, aiming to demonstrate robust AUV-Diver collaborations validated through extensive simulations and experiments.

Background

Underwater environments are among the most challenging operational domains due to their unpredictability, extreme pressure conditions, limited visibility, and communication constraints. Human divers working in these environments face significant safety risks, particularly in defense, search-and-rescue, law enforcement, and infrastructure inspection scenarios. While Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been deployed in these fields, their potential remains largely untapped due to limitations in real-time adaptability and human interaction.

Current AUV systems often operate independently, following pre-programmed missions with limited real-time decision-making capabilities. This restricts their usefulness in dynamic and high-risk situations, where divers must quickly adapt to changing conditions, assess threats, and make complex decisions. There is a clear need for AUVs that can function as intelligent, real-time assistants, enhancing human capabilities rather than merely executing pre-set tasks.

The SHARCEX project addresses this gap by developing a next-generation human-robot collaboration frameworkfor underwater operations. By integrating AI-driven AUVs with human divers, the project aims to create a synergistic system where both human and machine leverage each other’s strengths.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The project integrates expertise from multiple fields:

Collaboration partners:

Principal Investigators (PIs)