About the project

Objective
Based on empirical data from sidewalk robots’ trips, we will shed light on sidewalk mobility and improve real-world robot delivery operations. Through statistical analysis and Machine Learning (ML), we will assess the efficiency of robots’ paths and their relation to pedestrian infrastructure, interactions with different transport users (such as walkers, cyclists, e-scooters, and motorized vehicles), and other variables (e.g., weather).

A crucial task of the project will focus on integrating prediction models with routing algorithms to discover more effective routing solutions. Another task will involve identifying Walkability KPIs” to describe sidewalk mobility conditions based on the data collected.

Background
Sidewalk robots appear to be a promising solution for City Logistics. Hubs, retail locations, and even retrofitted vehicles might dispatch them for short-range trips and partially replace standard, less sustainable delivery methods. The ISMIR project aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of sidewalk robot delivery in realistic scenarios. The investigation of sidewalk navigation challenges will also provide the opportunity to explore pedestrian infrastructure and sidewalk mobility from a novel perspective.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The researchers in the team represent the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Department of Urban Planning & Environment, and KTH School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Intelligent Systems.

About the project

Objective
This project aims to support planning for universal access to clean cooking and contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) on Affordable and Clean Energy by radically integrating artificial intelligence (AI) methods into the open-source geospatial clean cooking model OnStove. To enhance OnStove, the project proposes implementing geospatial AI learning models to improve the spatial understanding of current technologies used for cooking and generate quasi-optimal transitions over an extended modelling period, considering as well behavioural issues. To achieve this, open-access geospatial information is combined with ground information gathered through available survey data. Finally, all comes together as a new open-source, user-friendly interface that will enable a broader audience to use the tool and ensure a long-term community of practice around clean cooking access modelling.

Background
Approximately 2.3 billion people still lack access to clean cooking worldwide, making them rely on traditional and polluting fuels. This practice poses challenges as households spend significant time collecting and cooking with traditional fuels, impacting women and children. Cooking with polluting fuels causes severe health consequences, estimated at around 3.2 million premature deaths annually from respiratory diseases. Moreover, traditional cooking exacerbates climate change and causes deforestation around the globe. On previous efforts, the first open-source geospatial tool for assessing and comparing the net benefits of various cooking solutions, OnStove, was developed. The tool was applied in the first study for sub-Saharan African countries, using Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) to evaluate cleaner cooking solutions in each square kilometre of the region. The tool considers benefits such as reduced morbidity, mortality, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and time saved while factoring in investment costs, fuel purchase, and operation and maintenance.

By calculating the relative differences between current fuel stoves used and cleaner alternatives, OnStove determines a transition’s net benefit (benefits minus costs) and selects the options providing the highest net benefit in each square kilometre. Decision-makers can use the outputs to understand the impacts of achieving clean cooking access, including estimates on deaths avoided, time saved, GHG emissions avoided, health and GHG emissions costs avoided, total costs, and affordability constraints. OnStove facilitates decision-makers in identifying areas for action, guiding market strategies, and prioritizing investments to promote diverse clean-stove options in low- and middle-income countries. The tool has gained policy community interest, aiding energy access planning in Nepal and Kenya. It is also integrated into global initiatives like the World Resources Institute’s Energy Access Explorer and the International Energy Agency’s Clean Cooking Outlook Special Report.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
Our project benefits from the expertise of a diverse team from the Department of Energy Technology and the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Furthermore, we collaborate closely with international organizations active in the clean cooking domain, such as the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA), the World Resources Institute, The International Energy Agency, and Sustainable Energy for All. This expert group ensures that we have the technical and practical background to develop an innovative solution that addresses the project’s challenges and supports achieving SDG7’s clean cooking goals.

About the project

Objective
We propose energy-efficient, high-speed, real-time monitoring of complex traffic scenarios in urban areas. Reliable real-time information about urban traffic supports emergency responders and city planners and reduces carbon emissions, thereby increasing the urban citizens’ quality of life. Using decentralized neuromorphic sensing and processing, we obtain four benefits compared to state-of-the-art: (1) low latency, (2) minimal transmission bandwidth, (3) low power, and (4) enhanced privacy.

As a result of the project, we expect to provide a Live Demonstrator which, in real-time, identifies objects in traffic (e.g., cars, bicycles, and scooters) while continuously running on a negligible energy budget (e.g., a solar cell).

Illustration of street cameras capturing a busy city scene, feeding data into a neural network, which classifies people, bicycles, scooters, cars, and lorries on the street.

Background
In the upcoming decades, urban areas will become “much larger, more complex, and interconnected, ” requiring optimized infrastructure with increasing automatization at increasingly larger scales. More broadly, real-time information about traffic and infrastructure utilization will become an increasingly valuable commodity for companies and officials to adapt and update the infrastructure as needed. Such data is generated by video cameras in cities today.

Embedding low-power event cameras with low-power neuromorphic local computation provides a uniquely scalable solution for the growing need to monitor urban traffic and resource flows in real time. Our project estimates a 100x reduction in power and a 20x reduction in installation cost.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The teams contribute expertise in neuromorphic hardware and algorithms for system development and expertise in traffic observation and urban traffic management. Only both teams and their complementary expertise can develop real-time low-power computing systems for the societal relevant task of urban traffic monitoring.

About the project

Objective

Background
Despite the enormous investments in automated vehicles, there are still challenges regarding safety and security. Moreover, open research testbeds are lacking to address these challenges. The CAVeaT project will address those needs.

The project will leverage advances and resources made available from industrial partners, from the TECoSA edge-computing and 5G testbed, and from the ITM and EECS schools at KTH, including the AD-EYE platform and an adversarial attack pipeline for autonomous driving simulation.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The researchers in the team represent the KTH School of Industrial Engineering and Management and the KTH School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

About the project

Objective
By delivering reliable, local and nearly real-time data about wildlife, the data gathered by FLOX Robotics drones provide insights for data-based wildlife-related decisions to veterinary institutes, nature conservationists, hunting associations, insurance companies and many others. Through AI-assisted identification of wildlife species, the stakeholders have the possibility to track the animal species which are injured, bearing diseases or have been involved in an incident.

The project demonstrates an integrated solution for automated mapping, identification, tracking and, when required, repelling wild animals using autonomous drones with AI-assisted computer vision and ultrasound repellent technology combined with a geographic information system (GIS)-like for data visualization, analysis and decision making.

Background
The problem of wildlife damage is widespread all over the world, from Sweden to Italy, in the US, India and many other countries. Historically, there has been limited means for quantifying the wild animal population, their moving patterns, and the damages they cause. Damage by wild animals to cultivated fields is a major cause of profit loss for farmers in Europe. In Sweden, in 2020, damage caused by wildlife occurred on 17% of the cultivated area for cereals and nearly 28% for starch potatoes. Temporary grasses are Sweden’s largest crop in acreage, and 17% of the cultivated area had some form of wildlife damage in 2020 [www.scb.se]. In Sweden, around 50% of agricultural companies reported damage from the wildstock in 2020, and more than one-third of farmers stated that the wildstock affects their choice of crops.

Wildlife-related damages are widely present not only in agriculture but also in forest areas. The “rooting” and “wallowing” by wild boars also has an environmental impact, destroying vegetation and degrading water quality. For wildlife-related insurance cases, there is often no physical evidence of species involved in the damage. The verification requires too high a burden of proof to be met to receive payments.

The project demonstrates an integrated solution for mapping and, when required, repelling wild animals using autonomous drones with AI-assisted computer vision and ultrasound repellent technology combined with a geographic information system-like (GIS) for data visualization, analysis and decision making. The project solution will help public authorities and decision making bodies to access site-specific identification of wildlife in larger areas, aggregated from separate fields to regional, national and even international levels.

Crossdisciplinary collaboration
The researchers in the team represent RISE Digital Systems and the Department of Computer and System Sciences at Stockholm University.

About the project

Objective
In the DataLEASH project, practically, we develop and test machine learning models, among other methods, to ensure the use of data without the risk of revealing people’s identities or allowing unwanted inferences about them. In a more theoretical approach, we aim at provable guarantees for privacy and take a holistic approach to the legal implications. This implies a quest for finding relevant rules and regulations and illuminating interpretation and application.

The project consortium from KTH, SU, and RISE has a unique set-up in terms of an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary profile among the researchers, combining perspectives from information theory, legal informatics, language processing, machine learning, cryptography, and systems security.

Background
Digitalization has resulted in more and more data being generated and collected from various sources (such as health care, customer service, surveillance cameras, etc.). The data is valuable for processing and additional analysis to improve predictions and planning. Advances in machine learning have improved this kind of data analysis, while data-protection regulation such as the GDPR has introduced constraints, limiting what data can be used and for what purpose. There is, thus a tension between the utility of data and the privacy of the individuals the data is about.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration
DataLEASH brings together researchers from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, KTH), the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) and the Department of Law both at Stockholm University and from the Decisions, Network, and Analytics lab at RISE.

Link to DataLEASH website on Department of Computer and System Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University

Activities & Results

Activities, awards, and other outputs

Click here for Demo HB Deid

Results

Research objectives of DataLEASH are: (i) develop and study privacy measures suitable for privacy risk assessment and utility optimization; (ii) characterization of fundamental bounds on data disclosure mechanisms; (iii) design and study of efficient data disclosure mechanisms with privacy guarantees; (iv) demonstration and testing of algorithms using real-data repositories; (v) study of the cross-disciplinary privacy aspects between law and information technology.

Research achievements and main results of DataLEASH:

In the interplay between information technology and law, the project itself has been a testbed, given the personal data processing in research of this kind. Quite often, there is a challenge merely to find the governing legal framework. Practical experiences and theoretical studies can be a sign of this. However, much research today is concentrated on specific data protection regulations. The reasoning above boils down to a broadened approach to GDPR.

Publications

We like to inspire and share interesting knowledge…

Videos & Presentations

Watch recorded videos and download the presentations…

Research: Privacy-preserving data analysis. We apply tools from information theory to problems related to privacy-preserving data analysis
Speaker: Sara Saeidian, PhD student, saeidian@kth.se
Supervisors: Tobias J. Oechtering, Mikael Skoglund

Click here to watch the recorded video presentation on “Privacy-preserving data analysis”

OUR PRESENTATIONS
Quantifying Membership Privacy via Information Leakage

Sara Saeidian, Giulia Cervia, Tobias J. Oechtering, Mikael Skoglund, “Quantifying Membership Privacy via Information Leakage, IEEE Transactions Information Forensics and Security, Vol.16, pp. 3096-3108, 2021.

Machine learning models are known to memorize the unique properties of individual data points in a training set. This memorization capability can be exploited by several types of attacks to infer information about the training data, most notably, membership inference attacks. In this work, we propose an approach based on information leakage for guaranteeing membership privacy. Specifically, we propose to use a conditional form of the notion of maximal leakage to quantify the information leaking about individual data entries in a dataset, i.e., the entrywise information leakage.

We apply our privacy analysis to the Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles (PATE) framework for privacy-preserving classification of sensitive data and prove that the entrywise information leakage of its aggregation mechanism is Schur-concave when the injected noise has a log-concave probability density. The Schur-concavity of this leakage implies that increased consensus among teachers in labelling a query reduces its associated privacy cost. We also derive upper bounds on the entrywise information leakage when the aggregation mechanism uses Laplace distributed noise.

DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION HERE: Quantifying Membership Privacy via Information Leakage

About the project

Objective
The research team’s ambition is to develop a new research area in urban development (studies). Well-being in smart cities is the defined research area, focusing on interactions of human-machine-computers or “cyber-physical-human systems” based on human decision-making on an institutional, individual and neurological abstraction level. The smart city of the future is our main application area, as these are complex cyber-physical-human systems. The project will develop a framework for capturing interactions and dynamics in these systems and demonstrate the applications in user case studies.

Background
The health condition of a human being is the basis of individual and social well-being. The driving force for human-social behaviour and many choices individuals make is the desire for well-being, which will manifest in the future of smart cities. Networks, human agents, cyber agents, and physical infrastructure perform feedback and interactions in smart cities. Smart cities can efficiently and sustainably increase human well-being.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration
The research team represents the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, KTH), the School of Industrial Engineering and Management (ITM, KTH) and the School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE, KTH).

Find out more on HiSS webpage

Activities & Results

Find out what’s going on!

Activities, awards, and other outputs

Results

A general objective of the project is to link dominant mechanisms of decision-making and choice between the micro, meso and macro scales that are most relevant for advancing the sustainability agenda in smart cities. The specific objectives are related to theoretical and experimental studies of different aspects of decision-making at micro, meso and macro scales that help answer the following questions:

Publications

We like to inspire and share interesting knowledge!

  1. M. Lenninger, M. Skoglund, P. Herman & A. Kumar. Are single-peaked tuning curves tuned for speed rather than accuracy? Nature Communications (in review).
  2. M. Lundqvist, S.L. Brincat, M.R. Warden, T.J. Buschman, E.K. Miller & P. Herman. Working memory control dynamics follow principles of spatial computing. Nature Communications (in review).
  3. M. Molinari, J. Anund Vogel, D. Rolando. Using Living Labs to tackle innovation bottlenecks: the KTH Live-In Lab case study,Applied energy(Extension under review).
  4. N. Chrysanthidis, F. Fiebig, A. Lansner & P. Herman. “Traces of semantization-from episodic to semantic memory in a spiking cortical network model”, eNeuro, July 2022, 9 (4). https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0062-22.2022.
  5. Fontan, V. Cvetkovic, K. H. Johansson. On behavioral changes towards sustainability for connected individuals: a dynamic decision-making approach, in 4th IFAC Workshop on Cyber-Physical Human Systems, Houston, Texas, December 1-2, 2022.
  6. Taras Kucherenko, Rajmund Nagy, Michael Neff, Hedvig Kjellström, and Gustav Eje Henter. Multimodal analysis of the predictability of hand-gesture properties. In
  7. International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2022.
  8. M. Lundqvist, J. Rose, S.L. Brincat, M.R. Warden, T.J. Buschman, P. Herman, & E.K. Miller. “Reduced variability of bursting activity during working memory.” Scientific Reports 12, no. 1 (2022): 1-10.
  9. N.B. Ravichandran, A. Lansner & P. Herman. “Brain-like combination of feedforward and recurrent network components achieves prototype extraction and robust pattern recognition”. In: Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science. LOD 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Cham
  10. D. Rolando, W. Mazzotti, M. Molinari. Long-Term Evaluation of Comfort, Indoor Air Quality and Energy Performance in Buildings: The Case of the KTH Live-In Lab Testbeds, Energies, vol. 15, no. 14, pp. 4955, 2022.
  11. N. Chrysanthidis, F. Fiebig, A. Lansner & P. Herman. “Semantization of episodic memory in a spiking cortical attractor network model”, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, vol. 49, no. SUPPL 1, pp. S86–S87, 2021.
  12. A. Karvonen, V. Cvetkovic, P. Herman, K.H. Johansson, H. Kjellström, M. Molinari & M. Skoglund. “The ‘New Urban Science’: towards the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary pursuit of sustainable transformations.” Urban Transformations 3, no. 1 (2021): 1-13.
  13. M. Molinari, J. Anund Vogel, D. Rolando. Using Living Labs to tackle innovation bottlenecks: the KTH Live-In Lab case study, in Energy Proceedings – Applied Energy Symposium: MIT A+B, 2021.
  14. N.B. Ravichandran, A. Lansner & P. Herman. “Semi-supervised learning with Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Network”, in Proc. European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN) 2021. doi.org/10.14428/esann/2021.es2021-156.
  15. Ruibo Tu, Kun Zhang, Hedvig Kjellström, and Cheng Zhang. Optimal transport for causal discovery. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2022.
  16. Carles Balsells Rodas, Ruibo Tu, and Hedvig Kjellström. Causal discovery from conditionally stationary time-series, arXiv:2110.06257, 2021.
  17. M. Lenninger, M. Skoglund, P. Herman and A. Kumar. Bandwidth expansion in the brain: Optimal encoding manifolds for population coding. In Cosyne, 2021.
  18. S. Molavipour, G. Bassi, and M. Skoglund. On neural estimators for conditional mutual information using nearest neighbors sampling. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing 69:766-780, 2021.
  19. M. Sorkhei, G. Eje Henter, and H. Kjellström. Full-Glow: Fully conditional Glow for more realistic image generation. In DAGM German Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2021.
  20. Chenda Zhang and Hedvig Kjellström. A subjective model of human decision making
  21. based on Quantum Decision Theory, arXiv:2101.05851, 2021.
  22. M. Molinari and D. Rolando. Digital twin of the Live-In Lab Testbed KTH: Development and calibration. In Buildsim Nordic, 2020.
  23. D. Rolando and M. Molinari. Development of a comfort platform for user feedback: The experience of the KTH Live-In Lab. In International Conference on Applied Energy, 2020.
  24. E. Stefansson, F. J. Jiang, E. Nekouei, H. Nilsson, and K. H. Johansson. Modeling the decision-making in human driver overtaking. In IFAC World Congress, 2020.
  25. Y. Yi, L. Shan, P. E. Paré, and K. H. Johansson. Edge deletion algorithms for minimizing spread in SIR epidemic models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.11087, 2020.