About the project
Objective
This project aims to propose the generalized design method and computational architecture of more than 20 kinds of nonlinear functions. By this they can be used in more algorithm acceleration without doing a lot of repetitive development work.
Background
As the foundation of the future development of smart society, the digital chips play a key role. Behind these digital chips is the hardware acceleration of a large number of algorithms. The essence of the algorithm is mathematical operation, the most complex mathematical operation is nonlinear function calculation. So the proposed research question is how to improve the universality of nonlinear function VLSI design without affecting the performance and efficiency? It is a challenge.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Hui Chen received a PhD from Nanjing University (NJU) in 2022, China. His major is information and communication engineering. Hui’s research interests include arithmetic circuits, integrated circuits for elementary functions and reconfigurable computing.
Main supervisor
Zhonghai Lu, Professor at the Division of Electronics and Embedded Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, EECS, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Masoumeh Ebrahimi, Associate Professor, Division of Electronics and Embedded Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, EECS, KTH.
About the project
Objective
This research will apply data-driven design to Climate Action by utilizing data from design, manufacturing, and the entire product lifecycle to learn how early-stage decision-making maps to downstream carbon emissions for complex systems.
Background
Artificial Intelligence has transformed the fields of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Data-driven methods also have the potential to be a valuable tool in the fight against climate change, but not before such data is ready for computation. If data from product design, manufacturing, consumption, and retirement could be quantitatively represented for computation, then we could learn how to produce and consume more sustainably.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Haluk Akay completed his doctoral research in mechanical engineering at MIT. His doctoral thesis developed methods to represent textual design data for computation by extracting structured “what-how” information and evaluating designed systems using AI-based language modelling and design principles.
Haluk’s research interests lie in using design and data-driven methods to address complex climate change and sustainability problems. He also has experience in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication and product design.
Main supervisor
Francesco Fuso-Nerini, Associate Professor, ITH, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Iolanda Leite, Associate Professor, Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH.
Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event.
About the project
Objective
It indeed consists of two sub-projects. Firstly, as the most promising technology in achieving 10 Gbs peak data rates, millimetre-wave (mmWave) communications have received remarkable attention from academia and industry. Thus, in the project of intelligent wireless communications, we aim to develop several machine learning-based beam tracking algorithms for mobile mmWave communications, which can work efficiently without relying on a priori knowledge of channel dynamics. While in the project of high-accuracy positioning systems, we aim to leverage mmWave signals and other techniques, such as intelligent reflecting surfaces, to achieve centimetre-level localization accuracy.
Background
Driven by the ever-increasing mobile data traffic, 5G-and-beyond (B5G) networks are envisioned as a key enabler to support a variety of novel use cases, such as autonomous cars, industrial automation, multisensory extended reality (XR), e-health, etc. Considering the emergence of these use cases and the more and more complicated network structure, artificial intelligence is expected to be essential to assist in making the B5G version conceivable.
With regard to high-accuracy localization, it will play a critical role in almost all use cases of the B5G networks. Specifically, depending on the usage scenarios, the requirement for localization accuracy ranges from 1 cm to 10 cm for smart factory applications. However, most current localization services can, at best, achieve meter-level localization accuracy and, therefore, cannot meet the centimetre-level localization accuracy requirements of the emerging use cases in the B5G era, which emphasizes the need for more advanced localization techniques.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Deyou Zhang is a Digital Futures Postdoc at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of KTH, supervised by Dr Ming Xiao, Prof. Lihui Wang, and Dr Zhibo Pang. Before joining KTH, he obtained his PhD at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research interests include millimetre-wave communications, intelligent reflecting surfaces, and wireless federated learning.
Main supervisor
Ming Xiao, Associate Professor, Division of ISE, EECS School, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Zhibo Pang, Senior Principal Scientist, Department of Automation Technology, ABB Corporate Research Sweden and Adjunct Professor, Department of Intelligent Systems, EECS, KTH.
Lihui Wang, Professor and Chair of Sustainable Manufacturing, KTH.
Watch the recorded presentation at Digitalize in Stockholm 2022 event.
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
This project aims to improve a Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System design and combine it with state-of-the-art Deep Learning models for perception. This allows the system to be applied in real-world environments, intending to enhance the autonomy of robots where human intervention is to be kept at a minimum. Application-wise, the system is expected to autonomously perform inspection and maintenance operations of city infrastructure such as power plants. This will ultimately lead to new digitisation technology, which can help solve environmental and societal problems.
Background
The human’s ability to reason has evolved to adapt to difficult situations and changes in the environment faster than current AI models allow. Animals that reason effectively outsmart other species and gain key survival advantages. Non-Axiomatic Reasoning can explain most of these cognitive abilities and provides a roadmap for cognitive enhancements based on psychological and neuroscientific insights. Also, Learning can be explained as inductive reasoning using Non-Axiomatic Logic, an aspect most reasoning systems lack while being a key aspect of intelligence.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Patrick Hammer is a postdoc researcher at Stockholm University, Department of Psychology, working with Robert Johansson and Pawel Herman. Before joining Stockholm University, he got his PhD in Computer Science (AI track) at Temple University, Pennsylvania, United States, where he was a full-time research assistant of Pei Wang. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Reasoning Systems, Autonomous Robots, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Cognitive Science.
Main supervisor
Robert Johansson, Associate Professor at Stockholm University.
Co-supervisor
Pawel Herman, Associate Professor, Computer Science, Division of Computational Science and Technology at KTH.
Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event.
About the project
Objective
Our research project aims to propose a complete, fully distributed scheme in intelligent task allocation and security-based controller synthesis with relative displacement or bearing-only information for networked multi-agent systems like UAVs or UGVs. The designed methods are expected to be used directly in multiple unmanned autonomous systems. The research plays a significant role in improving the autonomy and swarming of the pursuit system and has great application potential in search and rescue, intelligent transportation, and public protection.
Background
Multiple autonomous unmanned systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and unmanned ground vehicles, are projected to play important roles in many industrial and societal applications, such as search and rescue, cooperative payload carrying, and warehouse management. In the community of multi-agent control, the pursuit-evasion game has been a hot topic whose objectives are to achieve optimal sensor placement intelligent and distributed task allocation, following which the control problem is formulated as a distributed optimization problem with a defined performance index. The objectives of this project thus include the exploration of cooperative and distributed optimal control strategies with relative position measurements or bearing-only information.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Panpan Zhou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mathematics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Before joining KTH, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Bachelor’s degree in the School of Automation from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, in 2017 and her PhD from CUHK in 2021. Her research interests include control theory and applications of multi-agent systems and motion planning of micro aerial vehicles.
Main supervisor
Xiaoming Hu, professor, Department of Mathematics, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Bo Wahlberg, professor, Division of Decision and Control Systems, KTH.
Watch the recorded presentation at the Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 event.
About the project
Objective
The objective of this project is to learn distributed control policies for multi-robot systems that scale on-demand, in multi-laterally evolving complex dynamic environments.
Background
Multi-robot systems such as drone swarms offer unparalleled advantages in assisting ground-based human-robot teams in humanitarian, and disaster-response missions thanks to their ability to operate in remote, communication-denied environments. However, in practical deployments such systems must learn how to balance various auxiliary objectives on-demand for maximizing the collective utility in highly dynamic environments. For example, a robust drone swarm control policy must prioritize the most severely affected area in a disaster-response event, and direct more robots to tackle it, on-the-fly.
In this project, we aim to design a framework that can help us learn such control policies while taking into account the robot’s varying capabilities. Upon designing such a framework, we further understand that we can minimize the human bias in hand-engineered task prioritizing.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Malintha Fernando received his Ph.D in 2023 from Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His doctoral research focused on designing cooperative scalable control policies for multi-drone systems that are robust to communication failures. Such policies lend themselves to many Urban Air Mobility (UAM) applications such as autonomous parcel delivery, where decentralized decision-making under local information is required to achieve the necessary scalability over the geographical span and in the number of vehicles.
Prior to joining KTH, Malintha worked as a visiting lecturer in Machine Learning at Indiana University. He has completed an internship at Open Robotics, Mountain View, and completed his undergraduate education from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
Main supervisor
Silun Zhang, Assistant Professor, Division of Optimization and System Theory, Department of Mathematics, KTH.
Co-supervisor
Petter Ögren, Professor, Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL) at KTH.