EWInners 2021

For his valuable contributions to science and society, Marjan Popov has been elevated to an IEEE Fellow. This is one of the highest recognitions within the international society of electrical engineers. Over the past 17 years, Marjan has been conducting research in the field of protection of electricity grids. Power systems are subjected to numerous disturbances, which are classified according to their duration, making the protection schemes very complicated. Switching and lightning are two phenomena causing severe impact on transformers and power systems.

Some of the groundbreaking findings from Marjan's research are how the cable and circuit breaker influence the resonances occurring during transformer (de)energization. Marjan also proved that the frequency dependent impedance of soil significantly affects transformers, and is sometimes the reason for 'mysterious failures'. In his research, he also investigated how electromagnetic waves propagate differently in cables, transformers and in the ground, leading to severe oscillations which may damage the transformers.

The contribution of this research is utilized by network operators  developing protection methods for transformers based on highly accurate modelling platform. Currently, with his team at the Power System Protection Centre, Marjan is investigating electromagnetic wave propagation in Dutch transmission/distribution system, which will be verified by field measurements.

PhD student Lizhou Wu (Quantum & Computer Engineering) has won the prestigious 'IEEE TTTC McCluskey Best Doctoral Thesis' award for his PhD research on systems testing, reliability, safety and validation of electronic circuits. He specifically investigated the emerging STT-MRAM technique, a form of computer memory based on minuscule rotating magnets instead of the traditional capacitors. The new STT-MRAM technique is very promising because it allows computers to use much less energy.

STT-MRAM is still under development, and reliable tests to see whether new parts have been made properly are therefore very important. In his research, with which he graduated Cum Laude, Lizhou showed that the usual tests often fail to detect unique errors. He subsequently developed a new testing technique that can reliably detect these errors. This significantly improves the quality of the commercially produced chips.

Francesco Fioranelli, Assistant Professor at the MS3 group, has received an Open Mind Grant as part of the Convergence Initiative between TU Delft, Erasmus MC and Erasmus University. The co-applicants were Caitlin Ramsey, PhD candidate at Erasmus MC (and former alumna of this department), and Lytske Bakker, PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

The proposal is entitled “Contactless monitoring of neonates in the intensive care unit”. The objective is to explore contactless measurements based on FMCW radar for monitoring key vital signs of neonates, by investigating technical feasibility, clinical reliability and cost effectiveness of the proposed techniques. It is a nice example of “convergence”, bringing together key expertise from all applicants to perform research that would be unfeasible in isolation. The ambition of the project is to start with a small pilot showing the feasibility and potential of the idea, to then build evidence and momentum to develop a new medical device.

Additional information can be found on the Symposium webpage which showcased the other funded Open Mind projects. 

Last Interspeech conference Odette Scharenborg was appointed vice-president of the ISCA board, the international organisation for research on human speech recognition and speech technology.

Odette works on more inclusive speech recognition. She does fundamental research that will allow languages and groups for which there is relatively little speech data to more easily make use of the technology. Within ISCA, Odette is committed to involving a diverse group of scientists with the research field. To give an example: by bringing together computer scientists and language scientists, speech recognition software will eventually get better at recognising speech that sounds different from 'normal' speech. In this way she hopes to make speech recognition accessible to speakers with an accent or dialect, or a speech impediment. In this way, the power of speech recognition becomes accessible to everyone.

Valuable research with potentially great impact: computers with speech recognition are becoming an increasingly important part of our environment. Just think of Siri, Alexa or Cortana.

Prof. Georgios Smaragdakis (Cybersecurity group) and colleagues from UCL, Microsoft, Columbia University, and FORTH were awarded the Best paper award in ACM SIGCOMM 2021 for their paper: "Seven Years in the Life of Supergiants' off-nets." SIGCOMM is the most important academic conference in Internet Architecture and Networking.  Today, more than 50% of Internet traffic originates from a small number of content providers, called Hypergiants, such as Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Akamai. To cope with the ever-growing demand, Hypergiants have installed servers deep inside residential networks. The award-winning paper provides the first generic and scalable method to discover and characterize these installations in networks around the globe. The study leverages massive public network scan data and analyses server certificates over the last seven years. The insights gained by this research shed new light on the developments and flow of traffic in the Internet. The artefacts of the work are made publicly available and are expected to help better model the Internet and better inform studies in different fields, including economics, statistics, engineering, and law.

The Electrical Sustainable Power Lab (ESP Lab) has been nominated for the NRP Gulden Feniks award for 2021. After making a selection from the 54 entries, the jury of experts visited the selected projects and then nominated eight projects. The ESP Lab is competing for this prestigious award along with the seven other nominees; they are among the very best examples of renovation and transformation projects. In order to achieve the climate targets, the Netherlands needs to generate more electricity using the sun and wind. The investment in this brand new laboratory is one step towards tackling this enormous challenge. It will allow us to prepare the Dutch electricity grid for the future.

The Electronics and Instrumentation Laboratory of our faculty has won three awards at a conference. The mission of the Electronic Instrumentation (EI) group is to realize smart sensor systems for the acquisition of data from physical, chemical and biomedical signals. This involves the design and fabrication of sensors, as well as of the precision analog and digital circuitry required to read them out. Roger Zamparette and Thije Rooijers both won a Best Poster Award. Efraim Eland was praised for his presentation. Both conferences (PRORISC and SAFE 2021) provide a networking forum for PhD researchers in respective fields to expand their network and discuss research ideas. Every year a technical university is responsible for the organisation.

The NWO Domain Board Science has approved seventeen grant applications in the Open Competition Domain Science-M programme. The themes vary from studying DNA repair machines and the investigation of cooperation between breeding birds to the mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. One of the applications accepted is that of Yves van Gennip (DIAM). About his research: ‘Many optimization problems are solved via a gradient flow: finding a valley in a landscape by running downhill. Certain image processing and data classification applications take the form of a gradient flow on a network. The question is if these discrete methods are consistent when the amount of available data increases: do we find better approximations of some limiting solution, or does the behaviour of the methods change drastically? By establishing mathematically rigorous discrete-to-continuum limits of the discrete gradient flows that question can be answered, consistency can be established, and the methods can be better trusted to give reliable outcomes.’

During the IEEE PVSC conference, Andres discussed the relevance of the reverse characteristics of solar cells in the energy yield of partially shaded photovoltaic modules. ‘We characterized the reverse IV curves of commercially available cells and simulated the energy yield of photovoltaic modules using an experimentally validated simulation framework. Results suggest that cells with low breakdown voltages can boost the energy yield up to 74% in modules that are heavily shaded. Also, yield gains larger than 1% can be achieved for modules that are partially shaded only 7% of the time.’ The IEEE PVSC conference takes place every year and provides a unique opportunity to discuss PV related developments.

At the end of June the board of NWO Domain AES granted 6 research projects within the Open Technology Programme (OTP). The projects range from a quieter MRI scanner and solutions for traffic jams to smarter hearing aids. One of the projects receiving funding is that of Richard Hendriks (from the Microelectronics Department). The aim of this project is to allow someone with hearing difficulties to fully benefit from improved intelligibility and sound localisation. To make this possible, Richard's team develops an algorithm. Hearing loss is a partial or total inability to hear. Hearing loss may be present at birth or acquired at any time afterwards. A hearing loss of more than 20 decibels is the norm for impaired hearing. Incidentally, impaired hearing is not the same as deafness.

Alex Stefanov, researcher at Intelligent Electrical Power Grids (EEMCS), had received an important grant in the NWO's Energy System Integration programme. It will be used to continue his RESCUE project: Resilience and Cyber Security of Integrated Cyber-Physical Energy Systems. The aim of the project is to defend our energy net, that is becoming more and more digitalised, against possible cyber attacks. Alex aims to do so by developing new software, training net maintainers and by setting up new reaction strategies. To see if his theories hold up in practice, he testing his research in a special unit of the new Electrical Sustainable Powerlab (ESP Lab) of TU Delft.

Transitioning to sustainable sources of energy demands a lot of our energy networks: sustainable energy is often volatile, supplying the net with a unpredictable supply of energy. To that cause, Matthijs de Weerdt is researching new methods of more intensive network maintenance. His project, NextGenOpt: Next Generation Sector-Coupling Models for Optimal Investments and Operation, has been awarded an NWO grant within the Energy System Integration programme. This will allow him to continue his research, in which he helps several parties in making the right investment choices. He does so by developing more accurate models portraying the results of their decisions within this increasingly complex system. A big puzzle, that has never been solved before, and only accepts an accurate answer.

EWI professor Karen Aardal was appointed last week as a board member of the NWO Domain Science. This is one of the four unique NWO Domains that plan new financing programmes. The science domain covers many different scientific disciplines, such as geography, astronomy, chemistry, computer science, life sciences, physics and mathematics. As a professor at the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, Karen brings with her an enormous knowledge on the area of applied mathematics and theoretical computer science. In recent years her research was concerned with the algorithmic optimization of complex systems. Think for example problems arising in logistics, and of positioning of ambulances and trauma helicopters in The Netherlands and in Norway. Karen will fulfil her position as board member for three years, starting on the 1st of September.

PhD student Abhairaj Singh has received an IBM PhD Fellowship Award for the academic year 2021. Abhairaj's award-winning work in brief: 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. The conventional Von Neumann architecture fails to meet these requirements mainly due to the memory-processor data transfer bottleneck. The research of Abhairaj explores the potential of memristor-based computing-in-memory (CIM) to realize smart local computing by exploiting the inherent properties of the architecture and the physical characteristics of memristor. Memristors are tiny electronic components through which small electrical currents flow.

Last month PhD student Lőrinc Mészáros won the EuroGOOS Kostas Nittis Award, a yearly prize awarded to young researches doing promising research in oceanography. With the accompanying grant, Lőrinc will be able to continue his research on seawater quality, by developing algorithms that automatically analyse data, such as satellite photos or weather predictions. This will not only allow researchers to better understand the current affairs of our oceans, but will also make it possible to make more accurate predictions on future states. Specifically this latter application proves to be promising, and was lauded by the jury: it can play a vital role in managing changing climates, or in understanding the impact of human activities. Especially poorer coastal regions with less scientific research and available data are helped by Lőrinc’s research, as his algorithms can be deployed completely remote

A presentation by PhD student Ginger Egberts was chosen as the very best during an important international conference in the field of bioinformatics, computational biology and biomedical engineering. In her presentation, she discussed the research she is conducting together with scientists Fred Vermolen and Paul van Zuijlen. With them, Ginger works on mathematical models to predict contraction in burn scars. Contraction means that the muscle delivers force, but no movement. It is a process through which a permanent change in the position of a body part can occur. Think of a hand that remains in the shape of a claw. When a patient experiences a reduction in mobility, such as difficulty in getting dressed, this is called a contracture. Treatment of such a contracture usually consists of surgery. The research, which Ginger presented at the conference, looks at the applicability of a specific mathematical model and the sensitivity of the parameters.

At 26 April Professor Kees Vuik, expert in the field of numerical analysis, received a Royal Distinction. At the town hall of Capelle aan den IJssel, Vuik was appointed Officer in the Order of Orange Nassau – this honour is conferred on a person who has rendered outstanding service to the Dutch society. Because Vuik has not only meant a great deal to the Dutch society as a scientist: his humble, connecting and pro-active personality has touched the lives of many outside the campus. He was, for example, for years an active member of his church community, and as local treasurer he played an important role for the Dutch Cancer Society. As a scientist, Vuik has made great and integral efforts in developing the Delft High-Performance Computing Centre.

The European Union has awarded TU Delft researcher Piet Van Mieghem an ERC Advanced Grant. This grant, worth 2.5 million euros, was established to encourage groundbreaking, high-risk research and is mainly awarded to academics who have a significant track record of research within their own field. Van Mieghem is aiming to use the subsidy to further research the spread of the coronavirus, especially in Europa. Carefully analysis of past spreads has revealed that the current pandemic does not seem to fit with the current standard models of network sciences. This means that the calculations that are currently used in predicting the pandemic are generating false results. By solving these problems, Van Mieghem’s research will thus play a vital role in managing an minimising future pandemics.

Although interaction between science and society is of enormous importance, science communication is still far from being recognised as integral to the tasks of science. The pilot fund ‘Science communication by scientists: Appreciated!’ – set up by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and administered by the Academy – takes a step towards showcasing and rewarding the many scientists who have dedicated themselves to science communication. A total of 96 applications have been submitted by 62 faculties, with all Dutch universities participating. Of these, 91 have been awarded funding. Each team has received € 10,000. At several faculties, the communicative efforts of (groups of) scientists around a particular topic have been appreciated. Two applications from the Faculty of EEMCS were accepted: the proposal by 1) Natasja de Groot and the proposal by 2) Marieke Kootte, Neil Budko and Theresia van Essen.

Over the next few years, Amsterdam Southeast will be serving as a test location for an innovative new neighbourhood energy platform. The platform is aimed at allowing local electricity grids to be managed intelligently in areas like Amsterdam Southeast where a lot of development is expected in the future. Part of the Southeast region of Amsterdam will be used to develop an initial simulation for the neighbourhood energy platform. This will be done to simulate all energy flows, relevant buildings and energy infrastructure. Thereafter, things like charging terminals, solar panels, new-builds, existing buildings and heat pumps in the platform will be inter-connected within the simulation, in order to research how energy can be distributed and exchanged in an intelligent manner. If the study demonstrates the effectiveness of the platform, it can be implemented in Southeast as well as other urban areas. A subsidy was awarded by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, and co-financing was provided by the Municipality of Amsterdam and other parties, so the neighbourhood energy platform could be developed. From our faculty, scientists Peter Palenksy and Arjen van der Meer, among others, are involved.

The increasing number of heat pumps, electric cars and solar panels in the built environment poses major challenges, such as the prevention of overload in the regional (and national) electricity system. However, increased use and development of these technologies also offers opportunities to deploy smart flexibility services in the built environment on a large scale. For example, by charging electric cars at night rather than during the daytime, when the electricity grid is much more heavily utilized. Heat pumps can also offer flexibility. The use of flexibility is often mentioned as an alternative to grid reinforcement. To determine how realistic this is, GO-e develops calculation tools and methodologies with which regional grid operators can make substantiated decisions about whether, when, where and how flexibility can be used to prevent overloading of the electricity grid. The newly formed GO-e (Built Environment Electrification) Consortium was recently awarded a grant of 5.7 million euros and will run until early 2024. The GO-e consortium includes EEMCS scientists Peter Palenksy and Arjen van der Meer.

Tiago was recently awarded a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) grant. The HFSP supports fundamental research that applies novel and interdisciplinary approaches to understand biological problems. In addition, the HFSP supports science that extends beyond national borders, bringing together different disciplines. Successful applications are (potentially) groundbreaking and contain a line of research that is different from all current research. To make it even more concrete: Tiago has been awarded an Early Career grant. This grant is for teams of researchers who are all within 5 years of establishing an independent laboratory and within 10 years of obtaining their PhDs.

Alexandru Christian Neagu & Jinhan Ba have won the 3 E-Royal SMIT BSc prize. This prize is awarded annually by the so-called Stichting 3 E. Under the guidance of José Rueda Torres, Alexandru and Jinhan wrote the prize-winning thesis. An (English) summary of the thesis: ‘The goal of this graduation project was to design a state-of-the-art central farm controller. The designed central farm controller distinguishes itself from prevailing controllers by including a subsystem (the optimisation unit) that contributes to an improvement in power transmission efficiency, decrease in maintenance costs and an increase in system reliability/robustness. This thesis describes the design process of the optimisation unit and the verification of its feasibility.’ The 3 E Field comprises Electrical Energy Engineering and Electricity Supply technology (including generation, transport, distribution, smart systems, environmentally friendly techniques and technical-economic optimization for electricity supply and utilization).

Innovative energy transition research receives a grant from the Dutch Research Council NWO. Different scientists will link artificial intelligence research to innovation in legislation and regulation to accelerate the energy transition. Among the researchers are José Rueda Torres & Mart van der Meijden (Intelligent Electrical Power Grids Group). MEGAMIND focuses on the so-called edges of the electricity system: the distribution networks and the electricity producing and consuming devices connected to them. The program aims to lift the mutual stranglehold between technology and regulation. If laws and regulations lag behind technological developments, they inhibit the innovation needed for sustainability, and vice versa.

The Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) announced nine new Senior Member Honorees. One of the people appointed as a Senior Member is EEMCS scientist Neil Yorke-Smith. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments within the field of artificial intelligence. To be eligible for nomination for Senior Member, candidates must be consecutive members of AAAI for at least five years and have been active in the professional arena for at least ten years, and they must demonstrate achievements in scholarship, leadership, and/or professional service. Founded in 1979, the AAAI is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.

Geert Leus recently won an important award in the field of signal processing, the so-called Technical Achievement Award. The award ceremony took place during the EUSIPCO conference. During this conference the latest technological developments in the field of signal processing are discussed. With impact on computer vision, speech processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning to name a few.

Aleksandra Lekić has received the best paper award for 2020 in the International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications. In this paper, Aleksandra and her colleagues present a novel nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) formulation for the transient control of a DC‐DC converter. They demonstrate that a real‐time implementation of the proposed NMPC scheme using the PANOC solver can be efficiently applied to control DC‐DC converters in the microsecond range. 

How can we reduce local congestion in the electricity grid, while offering national energy markets more flexibility? The energy transition will present our electricity system with some unique challenges in the future. Starting on 1 April 2021, partners in Utrecht, Arnhem and Delft will join together in the ROBUST project to build a robust, flexible and future-proof electricity system for entire urban regions. One important pillar of the project will involve bi-directional charging for electric cars. ROBUST was awarded 3.3 million euros. From EEMCS, Simon Tindemans and Peter Palensky are involved.

Eelco Visser recently received the Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award. The OOPSLA is an annual conference on topics related to object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications. The papers are judged on the basis of the influence they have had over the past ten years. Visser's paper is about Spoofax, a platform that allows you to build your own programming language. In this post, Visser reconstructs how the paper originated. He also looks back at the first version of the Spoofax system, and explains how Spoofax (and all the research that has resulted from it) has developed since 2010.

Taico Aerts has won the VERSEN Master Thesis Award. VERSEN is the Dutch National Association for Software Engineering. Its mission is to bring together researchers, educators and practitioners in the field of software engineering in The Netherlands. Taico's master's thesis was about Statix, a language which generates a type checker from a declarative specification. However, Statix is not fast enough for quick feedback in IDEs because it always has to reanalyze all files. In his thesis, Taico improves the analysis time of Statix by applying the ideas of separate compilation to create a model for incremental analysis.

During the 2021 International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC), researchers at QuTech and the Faculty of EEMCS of TU Delft were awarded the ISSCC 2020 Jan Van Vessem Award for Outstanding European Paper. Since 1954, ISSCC is the premiere conference to present academic and industrial advances in integrated circuit with more than 3000 yearly attendees. At last year’s ISSCC, the researchers presented the design of an integrated circuit able to operate at extremely low temperatures while controlling qubits. This breakthrough brings us closer to realize large-scale quantum computers, which will solve problems intractable by even the most powerful supercomputers.

The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy has allocated 5.7 million euro to FLEXINet. In the upcoming years, the FLEXINet consortium will develop hybrid energy storage systems – capable of storing both heat and electricity. Pavol Bauer, professor at TU Delft and project leader and coordinator: ‘The aim of FLEXINet is a system that accelerates the energy transition. We hope to make a substantial contribution to reaching climate targets by cleverly combining various techniques – think of blending recycled batteries with flexible heat pumps and the charging of electric cars.’