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Emerging applications for Internet of Things devices – such as personalised healthcare, augmented reality and artificial intelligence – require vast computational power to be integrated into the device itself, but at only a fraction of the energy consumption attainable with current computer architectures. Researchers of the MNEMOSENE project# provided a proof-of-concept of an ultra-low power Computation-in-Memory architecture – a feat for which overall project leader Professor Said Hamdioui was recently presented the prestigious European Union ECS Innovation Award 2020.

Innatera is a deep tech spin-off of Delft University of Technology and is part of Delft Enterprises portfolio of innovative companies. Dutch neuromorphic processor company Innatera Nanosystems has raised 5 million Euros to bring its brain-inspired processing technology to sensors and sensor-based devices. 

EEMCS students Chen (Computer science) and van der Ven (Mathematics) have both won a Young Talent Award. This prize is award annually to students that have exhibited extraordinary talents and have the best grades. Apart from the honour of winning, the students also receive a monetary prize of €500. 

Team ZED has won the Dutch 4TU Impact Challenge and goes to the World Expo in Dubai. The start-up from the Delft University of Technology designs a B2B IoT solutions provider, which enables companies to harness the potential of wireless 'batteryless' applications. This way a broad range of products can become both smaller and cheaper.

During the TU Delft Best Graduate Award Ceremony 2020, eight recently graduated engineers presented their research and results of their excellent master thesis. Andreadis received the prestigious title TU Delft Best Graduate 2020. Georgios researched the capacity planning of data centers. Thanks to his research, these data centers may continue to meet the ever-growing computational demands while reducing their operational costs and increasing their efficiency and environmental sustainability.

The Hummingbird team, led by Venkatesha Prasad, has won the Best Paper Award. They won this award during the AMC Mobicom conference. The winning paper describes how to design a GPS receiver that is more efficient, for small satellites.

This year Verwer, together with co-author Toon Calders, won the Test of Time Award for a paper they wrote in 2010. In the paper the scientists examined the Naïve Bayes classifier in order to execute independent classification, given a sensitive attribute.

Four professors are dedicated to interdisciplinary research regarding subjects such as health and technology. Medical Delta wants to realise technological solutions for sustainable care. Medical Delta does this by conducting interdisciplinary theoretical and practical research.

Schöpe’s paper won third place during the FUSION conference. His research was about the management of resources for sensors that are used for radar technology. He is currently working on his PhD in the Sensing, Signals and Systems group.

The team Automatoes has won the Greenhouse Challenge. The team managed, with the use of artificial intelligence (AI), in a fully automated greenhouse, to grow not only the best tomatoes in terms of quality, but also managed to do it in the most sustainable way. With these techniques the team managed to beat professional growers.

Van der Meulen received an ENW KLEIN grant for his research in longitudinal data analysis. The goal of van der Meulen’s research is the development of Bayesian statistical methods for longitudinal data. KLEIN grants are meant for fundamental, innovative and high quality research.

Beste paper award DATE 2020 | Students win the Best Paper Award during the 2020 DATE conference with their work titled: Impact of Magnetic Coupling and Density on STT-MRAM Performance. This research is the result of a successful cooperation between QCE and EEMCS. The winning paper was selected out of a 194 total submissions.

During the 2020 DATE conference the outstanding dissertation award was given to the best dissertation from 2019. The award consists of a certificate and a monetary prize of €1000. Agabo won this prize with his research titled: Reliability Modeling and Mitigation for Embedded Memories.

Terhal is appointed as a KNAW member. She is connected to the Faculty of EEMCS and the research institute QuTech as a professor in Quantum computing. She is an authority when it comes to quantum information theory. She promoted in 1999, first in the country, on quantum mathematics. Terhal is currently an international expert when it comes to quantum error correction, a research domain that is crucial for building trustworthy quantum computers.

The IEEE SSCS has awarded the Predoctoral Achievement Award to twenty promising candidates. The candidates are selected based on their academic accomplishments, quality, amount of publications and how fitting their dissertation topic is with the organization. Two of these candidates are EEMCS students: Bishnu Patra and Sining Pan.

Sitaldin, together with his research group, has won the 3E foundation BSc Award for their thesis. The group researched the design of a drone on solar energy. Their new system allows for longer battery life and thus longer flight times.

The IEEE annually recognizes an exceptional world-wide contribution in the field of electro- and information technology. This recognition is shown by awarding the prestigious IEEE O. Pederson Award. This year Bult has managed to claim this prize, for his leadership in the field of embedded analogue and mixed signals in integrated circuits. His designs on this topic have a significant economic and societal impact.

The project titled: Optimization for and with Machine Learning (OPTIMAL) has received an NWO Groot grant. Together with colleagues two EEMCS scientists, Aardal and van Iersel, are involved. The researchers want to better understand existing optimization techniques for machine learning, to eventually use that knowledge to develop improved techniques. These techniques will then be used to solve optimization problems faster and more accurate in for instance society.

The Stieltjes prize is annually awarded to the best mathematical thesis of the last academic year. The winner will be chosen by a jury consisting of prominent mathematicians. This year the honour of winning, together with a monetary prize, will go to Yaroslavtsev. His research was supervised by Jan van Neerven and Mark Veraar. Yaroslavtsev’s thesis covered the crossroads between the mathematical topics: probability theory and analysis.

Cesar receives the prize for is research on modelling and steering of complex media-object collections (a configuration of real-time media and sensor data described in time and space). De jury praised Cesar for his impressive scientific accomplishment and his ability to convey his research in a comprehensive way. Because of this he reaches and excites a wide audience, even those who are not experts in the field.

Sovereignity4Europe, an interdisciplinary project proposal, wants to evaluate the principles of ‘Internet-of-Trust’ in an online community of 50.000 internet users. To do this the proposal received €3,3 million as financial support. TU Delft wants, together with Erasmus University Rotterdam, The University of Amsterdam and other parties, to design an internet based system that saves transactions in a blockchain in a confidential manner and conform European law. They want to achieve this by using insights gained from fields such as computer science, law and economics.

Van der Heijden won the KNW Thesis Prize with his research on water pump station IJmuiden. In his Master’s thesis van der Heijden developed a program which tells us when it is cheapest to pump. His conclusion? Pump when the wind blows.

The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) is a European wide initiative that was conceived in 2018 in order to further top quality research regarding machine learning and related research topics. ELLIS has selected TU Delft as one of their units for excellent European research regarding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The unit consists of top researchers that work on fundamental challenges in AI, with their focus on excellence in their research and societal impact.

NWO announced that the NEON consortium will receive a crossover subsidy consisting of €8,5 million for innovation that can accelerate the energy transition. Four Delft ‘principal investigators’ in total are involved with the NEON project. Together with their Aerospace engineering colleague Rolan Schmehl, EEMCS scientists Pavol Bauer, Gautham Ram and Thiago Batista fulfil this role. The consortium focusses on developing new methods and techniques to expedite the energy transition.

A new subsidy is granted to the HollandPTC and R&D consortium. The different projects that are part of this consortium consists of multiple centres. EEMCS scientist Ana Vilanova is involved with the research program that focusses on the development, implementation and evolution of human focused artificial intelligence (AI), and human-machine-interactions for efficient and high quality determination of the outline of head and neck tumours.

Van Iersel has received an EWN KLEIN grant. This grant is only given to research that is both fundamental in nature and of high quality. Van Iersel examines problems in network constructions, specifically in the field of phylogenetics. Phylogenetics is the field in which people look at the evolutionary history and connections between organisms. These connections are presented in a tree structure. Van Iersel tries to find problems in the tree structure of organism in order to improve the process.

Tuhin Das and Gabriëlle Zwaneveld have received the Young Talent Incentive Award. The award consists of €500 in prize money and is meant for students that got the best grades in their first year. The prize is awarded annually by the KNAW.

During the 26th edition of the International Mathematics Competition (ICM), Gabriel Visser managed to win gold. During the two days the competition lasted, participants had to showcase their mathematical talents by completing different assignments. The assignments were focused on themes such as analysis, linear algebra and combinatorics.

NWO has announced their new gravity grants, worth €113 million. The TU Delft is participating in three of the six new programs. These programs deal with Neurological research, artificial intelligence and ethics surrounding disruptive technology.

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) combines humans and artificial intelligence (AI). in this program Jonker will develop theoretical and practical methods for intelligent systems that work together with humans. Ethical and legal implications are the main focus during the development of these HI systems. The challenge in this program is finding an answer to the following question: how can we built adaptable intelligent systems that enhance human intelligence instead of replace them, and how can these systems enhance our strongpoints while compensating for our weak points?

New technological advancements are popping up everywhere, with the potential to initiate big changes on a social, cultural and economic level. They invoke complicated moral cases that need careful ethical reflection. During this program Jonker will develop new methods that are necessary to better understand the development and implementation of the new generation of disruptive technologies. This will lead to a better moral evaluation, which in turn will lead to fitting interventions, when needed.

Lelieveldt and Reinders work on Brainscapes. They develop new analytical and experimental tools to study the influence of risk group genes on the functioning of certain cells. In order to do so they need to go through immense amounts of data, named Brainscape. This data forms a detailed periodic system of brain cells and answers the question of which different kinds of brain cells there are and which genes control them. Eventually this will provide new insights that can be used to develop new treatments.

The NWO has appointed a Veni grant, with a maximum worth of €250.000, to two EEMCS scientists. The Veni offers young promising scientists the opportunity to develop their ideas for the next three years.

Bach-Poulsen’s research is titled Composable en Safe-by-Construction programmeren van taaldefinities. Typed languages are essential tools in order to develop robust software, because they guarantee the absence of certain mistakes. However, the complexity of redefining and composing typed languages hinders language innovation and improvement. This research project aims to lessen that complexity.

The research of Babaie is titled: Energiezuinige, mm-formaat radiofrequentiezendontvangers voor Internet-der-dingen toepassingen (PaTRIOT). Miniaturisation of wireless implantable medical device scan play a crucial role in medical care. The size of the current devices is currently limited by off-chip crystal oscillators. This proposal introduces a new digital intensive solution to break through that barrier and will make fully integrated implantable radio’s possible.

EWI alumnus Chen won the Else Kooi Award in 2019 for his work on chips meant for 3D miniature echo probes. Chen’s PhD-work was a multidisciplinary project touching on two topics: electronics and ultrasound. The goal of his work is to create two small echoprobes for 3D medical imaging. Chen has designed special chips that connect probes with ultrasound devices, and it can digitize signals for a better image quality with less cables.

The Zero Heroes convinced the jury with their idea of a completely batteryless and wireless sensor system that measures the behaviour of passengers. With this system the cabin crew can for instance see who still needs to put their chair upright or has to fasten their seatbelt. This system also makes cables redundant, which in its turn will ensure the plane needs less maintenance and will use less fuel. The jury praised the simplicity and technical applicability of the design.

The NWO has awarded a Vidi grant to three EEMCS scientists. Every scientist receives a maximum of €800.000.

Caspers’ research examines operational algebra’s. These give the mathematical description of quantummechanical observables like the place and impulses of small particles. In the research techniques developed from harmonics analysis are further developed to better understand these quantum systems.

Van Gemert examines deep learning. Deep learning makes a computer able to learn by itself by pulling information from big, expensive datasets. Van Gemert is planning to provide deep learning with pre-existing knowledge: ‘whatever you already know, you no longer have to learn, that saves trainings data.’

Verwer will look into how we analyse huge amounts of data, so-called software logs. He is going to develop an algorithm that is able to clarify these large amounts of data.

The Computer Graphics and Visualization department has won both first and second place on the 40th annual congress of the European association for computer graphics. For the first prize the department developed new algorithms and visual analysis strategies for the exploration of large single cell datasets in a way that wasn’t possible before. For the second prize the department used a 3D model based technique to visualize the anatomy of individual patients that aren’t visible from current imaging (e.g. certain nerves). The visualization strategies make it possible to explore risky areas for surgeons before they execute their procedure.

Zeman, EEMCS professor Photovoltaic Materials and Devices, has been knighted. Zeman received this award for his extensive scientific contribution to sustainable energy supply, which is a topic with a big societal impact. Zeman is an internationally recognized expert in sustainable energy. He has done ground breaking research on optic and electrical modelling of solar cells.

Central to the paper by Gijswijt is Set, a game consisting of 81 cards, every card has four properties that make every card unique: amount, colour, form and content. The goal of the game is to collect as many sets of three. By utilizing this game Gijswijt, together with Jordan Ellenberg, has made a breakthrough in the so called Cap Set problem.

Van der Velden has won the 3E-Royal Smit Bachelor Award for electrical engineering. In his project van der Velden developed a wireless charging system for handheld devices with low power. The challenge was to reach a high efficiency with a small power handover. The eventual coil-to-coil efficiency was 92.2%. The overall efficiency almost reached 70%.

The second prize for the IEEE industry Applications Society (IAS) Thesis Award, was awarded to Venugopal, with his research titled: Magnetic Energy Transfer in Roads. His research was supervised by Pavol Bauer and Braham Ferreira. The IEEE IAS Thesis competition is meant to give the best up and coming academic works, that focus on industrial applications in society, a spotlight.

Eisemann has received this award for his research into the accurate, detailed depiction of visualisations using modern graphics hardware. Not only did Eisemann receive a monetary prize worth €50.000, but he and NWO will also publish an academic poster with an explanation of his research and why it is so important. This poster will be shown at high schools, universities and other educational institutions.

In their research Bernstein and Geurtz evaluated the two organizational structures within artificial intelligence. They tested the reaction on a more top-down model (hierarchy, one boss) and the reaction on a more market based model (one agent sells tasks, so every other agents decides for themselves what to do). They used the game StarCraft for their research. The game turned out to be the ideal experimental environment. Their paper was accepted by AAMAS, one of the most prominent conferences when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Five TU Delft scientists received, from the NWO, a Vici grant worth €1,5 million. One of those scientists is EEMCS researcher Andy Zaidman. He received the person specific grant for the development of the innovative research line Testshift. Testshift will examine how the dynamics within a software team influence the test culture. Both in general and in specific areas.

The Micro Electronics (ME) department has decided to co-finance three PhD positions in order to strengthen their research themes. ME has been redefining the department for some time now. They did this around the following themes: Health & Wellbeing, XG, Safety & Security and Autonomous Systems. These themes are meant to forge a connection between technology and practical application. The researchers that received this grant are: Massimo Mastrangeli, Virgilio Valente, Bori Hunyadi, Akira Endo and Sten Vollebregt.

Wehner is one of the eight proud winners of the Ammodo Science Awards 2019. Additional to the award, the winners will receive a monetary prize worth €300.000. Wehner is working on a fundamental challenge: how entanglement can be created over a long distance, to make quantum internet possible.

Valente received a Health Prototype Grant worth €10.000, provided by the Delft Health Initiative. Valente received this grant for his proposal on Lab-on-CMOS and Organs-on-a-Chip (OoC). OoC systems represent the new border in biomedical engineering. They are meant to reproduce an imitate important aspects of organs. OoC’s are part of an important revolution in the development of future medical treatments and medical drugs. They offer an essential alternative for conventional cell cultures and animal models.

Zamalloa is looking for a way to have wireless communication with light. In the same way you can use mirrors to reflect light, other objects can do the same. The research focusses on the adjustment of reflective properties of different objects. In doing so, different reflecting objects can then be used to send different kinds of information.

Van Gemert researches pixel-free deep learning. Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) networks are dependent on the resolution of the images in the dataset. When the resolution changes, the architecture of the network changes as well. Van Gemert finds that a thing of the past, and therefore wants to introduce and develop pixel-free learning in deep learning. This can lead to more flexible models.

Wang examines the spread of contagion. This phenomenon occurs between social networks. When these networks engage they exchange and spread information. The actions of a user in network A can affect users in network B. Wang’s goal is to discover the mechanisms that are part of this contagion and eventually capture them in a model.