Keep up with the action

As part of the Bench2Biz workshops, a team led by Carlo Cenedese explored his research results for commercialization potential. There, Carlo gained insights from various different viewpoints and benefitted from honest feedback within a safe environment from which he could potentially launch his entrepreneurial career.

In Girls In Control workshops, Swiss elementary school students have the chance to connect mathematics to the real world – and be inspired to be the next generation of women to join the field of Automation.

The first Junior Retreat was organised in October 2021 in the Congress Hotel Seepark in Thun. It was the occasion for most of our PhD students and Postdocs to meet physically for the first time. This was a successful event organised by their peers. All researchers are looking forward next year!

In the last week of November, the first Site Visit of the NCCR Automation by the SNSF and the external Review Panel took place. Overall it was a very successful and fruitful event, resulting in plenty of food for thought for us.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered major vulnerabilities in DRAM memory devices, which are widely used in computers, tablets and smartphones. The vulnerabilities have now been published together with the National Cyber Security Centre, which for the first time has assigned an identification number for it.

Traditional control schemes rely on mathematical knowledge of the system they control. Yet this knowledge is not always available – for example, when the system is very complex. Researchers of the EPFL and the NCCR Automation have developed a novel scheme that effectively controls systems based on measured data alone – even when the data is inaccurate.

Researchers of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation, led by Alessandro Zanardi of ETH Zurich, have investigated how autonomous vehicles could become better road users in an urban environment. The result is both surprisingly simple and complex at the same time.

Naomi Stricker is in the third year of her PhD at the Computer Engineering Group at ETH Zurich, in which she focuses on making energy harvesting systems more robust and able to communicate and collaborate. Her research could help do anything from heating buildings more efficiently to monitoring air quality.

Mahsa Rahimi-Siegrist is a doctoral student and research assistant at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems at ETH Zurich and a member of the NCCR Automation. She is interested in the behavior of public transport passengers and works on improving information strategies to increase the quality of transport services.

Swiss electricity generation has a very low carbon footprint. However, this is often not the case for imports. Researchers from the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation, led by Loris di Natale from EMPA, investigated how electric cars could help reduce the need for energy imports from fossil fuels.

NCCR Automation took part in its first Hackathon, the 2021 Energy Data Hackdays, where we proposed a challenge, gained experience with the open innovation culture and inspiration for our moon-shoot project.

NCCR Automation Seminar Series is a weekly seminar covering broad topics of interests for the NCCR Automation.

Congratulations to our PI and Executive Committee member Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate who founded the Control Systems Society Chapter of the IEEE Swiss Section. He is now the chair of this chapter. 

Pengbo Zhu is a first year PhD researcher who joined the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation last October. With the help of intelligent systems, she works on improving the spatial distribution of shared vehicles. In doing so, Zhu hopes to positively impact quality of life in cities around the world.

Mahrokh Ghoddousiboroujeni is a first year PhD researcher, who joined the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) on Automation last November. The algorithms she works on could one day help to keep an increasingly renewable electrical grid in balance.

NCCR Automation is opening its network to new members to address the social science dimension of automation and to strengthen its research on embedded systems, cyber-security and data science.

As part of the #NCCRWomen campaign, five of the NCCR Automation Women introduced their research to show young people of high school or undergraduate age who they are, what they do and why they do it.

The NCCR Automation is a large-scale research network funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. John Lygeros, director of the program, explains why such an effort is needed and what the more than 40 researchers are working on.

The website of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) "Dependable ubiquitous automation" is online.