Archive

We generate more and more electricity from solar panels and windmills, but what if there is no wind and the sun is not shining? Will you still be able to charge your phone? This is one of the many questions that will be addressed in a brand new series of lectures by the MuseumJeugdUniversiteit. For this "green" series – made especially for children between the ages of 8 and 12 – this long-term collaboration between MuseumJeugdUniversteit and Science Centre Delft travels to the TU Delft campus, which celebrates its 180th anniversary this year.

Solar foil represents the future. It can be applied in countless and unique ways – all the way from integrating it into traditional roof tiles through to creating new large-scale solar parks that reduce the price of our electricity. By signing a new four-year research contract, TU Delft and HyET Solar have sped up the introduction of the next generation of solar foil, bringing this vision of the future a significant step closer.

The ESP Lab has been awarded the Wild Card Renovation of the Gulden Feniks 2021. The wild card is granted by the jury to a project that has a major impact with a relatively low investment or is otherwise special and exceptional in nature.

On 8 February 2022, TU Delft launches a programme of four new massive open online courses on Intelligent and Integrated Energy Systems.

The energy transition will be felt most keenly in residential areas, where there are major challenges. . At The Green Village – the field lab for sustainable innovation on the TU Delft Campus – a unique project to accelerate the energy transition in the built environment will start on Friday 14 January: the 24/7 Energy Lab.

Young mathematicians Carolina Urzúa Torres and Kristin Kirchner have both received a NWO Veni grant for their promising research. Both of them will develop more efficient computational methods. For Maxwell's equations, which form the mathematical basis for dealing with electromagnetic radiation, and for evaluating large spatiotemporal datasets – that is, data that has been collected over time and space.

From 14 January 2022 onwards, TU Delft celebrates its 180th anniversary. To mark the occasion, we want to highlight our role in the energy transition.

TU Delft is looking for talented PhD students to join eight new TU Delft AI Labs. Over the next few years they will tackle the question 'How can you accelerate scientific progress with the help of artificial intelligence (AI)?'. Because AI plays a role in all fields of science, the research will involve collaboration between scientists specialising in AI and those working in other disciplines.

Researchers from Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) have developed an algorithm to predict patient response to anti-cancer drugs. This allows us to identify more rapidly if some drugs can have a positive effect on a specific patient, even for complicated medicines such as chemotherapies where response is typically hard to predict. This method is called TRANSACT and makes use of the wealth of data previously collected through research with cell lines.

Said Hamdioui's 'computation-in-memory' is the Best Tech Idea of 2021 according to the jury of KIJK magazine. The jury praised Said's computer architecture for making numerous new innovations possible: "the Internet of Things requires large amounts of computers that all must be very energy-efficient. Memristors can be the basis for this and that makes this idea, however young, very important."

On Tuesday 2 November nine professors have been officially inducted as 'Medical Delta Professor'. This took place during a festive meeting as part of the Medical Delta Conference. The professors have each earned their reputations doing research in the field between health and technology. They all officially combine at least two appointments at Leiden University, LUMC, TU Delft, Erasmus University and/or Erasmus MC. With these dual appointments and their research they bring technology and health care closer together.

Researchers from Leiden University, together with TU Delft, SRON, and others, have discovered a new form of 'quantum liquid'. Advanced knowledge of superconducting materials, gained in part through astronomical research and the development of quantum computers, was a key factor in the research. However, although this new quantum fluid is demonstrated, it is still completely unexplainable. Indeed, it turns a number of standard theories upside down. The results are published in Science.

Over the past 8 years, research has been carried out into smart energy systems. The final publication of the URSES* research programme has now been delivered. An interdisciplinary study and TU Delft was one of the 51 partners in the research programme. This included the PMU project, led by Marjan Popov, lecturer and researcher at TU Delft, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS). He investigated a way to monitor the electricity network.

In a major study funded by U.S Government, an international consortium of researchers successfully mapped the different types of brain cells in the motor cortex. Scientists from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) contributed specific expertise to visualize the data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve some of society's most important challenges, for example the mounting pressure on healthcare, while at the same time enriching and improving many other aspects of our society, such as transport. In short, the impact of AI is enormous, and it may even become the foundation of our future. Therefore, it is extra important that we are sure that all developed AI systems and techniques are completely reliable. The ROBUST consortium, in which TU Delft plays an essential role in the field of fundamental and applied AI knowledge, investigates how AI-based systems can be made safer and more reliable – and thus better contribute to social issues.

In order to ensure that the electricity grid is prepared for the future, TU Delft, the Dutch government and partners including grid operator TenneT have joined forces to build a brand-new laboratory: the Electrical Sustainable Power Lab, otherwise known as the ESP Lab. The laboratory – described as a ‘veritable temple of sustainability’ – will be officially opened on the afternoon of Friday, 1 October 2021.

Last year, computer engineers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and Northwestern University introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play. The same team now introduces a new platform that enables makers, hobbyists and novice programmers to build their own battery-free electronic devices that run with intermittent, harvested energy.

Making a significant contribution to creating opportunities for a CO2-free energy system, this is what 150 representatives from the business community, knowledge institutions and government are working on within the Dutch AI Coalition. The Energy and Sustainability working group collaborated on the position paper 'AI as an accelerator of the energy transition', which sets out the opportunities for a CO2-free energy system. Researchers from TU Delft have made an active contribution to this agenda.

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 ACM flagship conference in Internet Architecture and Networking.

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.

If you were on campus between 14 and 18 June, you cannot have failed to see the long series of posters in Mekelpark showing the broad spectrum of Systems Engineering. From fast food delivery drones to jellyfish alarms and smart beehives. But where did the posters come from?

Vibrant groups full of creativity and interesting new research, but above all: a new batch of bachelor students ready for all the possible academic hurdles they will face during their master's. The new "Research Project" of the renewed Computer Science and Engineering curriculum is a great success! But what made that possible?

Using the region as living lab, the Convergence Alliance creates a leading research and innovation ecosystem in South Holland, with great (inter)national appeal and ambitions. One of the knowledge cluster of the alliance is ‘AI, Data & Digitalisation’, with representatives from the universities of Leiden, Rotterdam and Delft and Leiden University Medical Center and Erasmus Medical Center.

Vanaf 15 juli 2021 is Annoesjka Cabo benoemd tot directeur onderwijs aan de faculteit Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica. Daarmee volgt zij Geert-Jan Houben op die zich als pro vice rector magnificus gaat focussen op het leiding geven aan de activiteiten van de TU Delft AI initiative.

In the Mercury Machine Learning Lab, researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) will be working together with Booking.com on various improved recommendation systems.

Lunar Zebro, an ambitious team at TU Delft will work together with TNO (The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research) to build the lightest and smallest Moon rover to date.

Energy transition is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The transition to sustainable energy is complex and requires change at multiple levels. Three Delft research groups, with an grant from NWO, will conduct research into system integration within the energy transition.

The Port & Maritime working group of the Dutch AI Coalition (NLAIC) has presented a position paper ‘Koersen op AI‘ (Heading for AI) on 10 June 2021, detailing the maritime ambitions in the field of AI. As part of the core group of this working group, TU Delft researchers have actively contributed to this joint agenda.

Today Professor Kees Vuik, expert in the field of numerical analysis, received a Royal Distinction.

The European Union has awarded TU Delft researcher Piet Van Mieghem an ERC Advanced Grant.

An international photovoltaics working group has developed a new transparent material to serve as a top layer for solar cells, based on nanocrystals. According to simulations performed by the participating TU Delft researchers, this layer can increase the efficiency of mass-produced solar cells to within a percent of their practical limit.

This week the Dutch project ABOARD (A personalized medicine approach for Alzheimer’s disease), a collaboration of more than thirty partners, has been launched. ABOARD aims to prepare for a future in which Alzheimer’s disease is stopped before dementia has started. ABOARD achieves this by improving diagnostic markers, developing personalized risk scores and by focusing on prevention through increased awareness of dementia and brain health.

TU Delft is building the Delft High-Performance Computing Centre (DHPC). This supercomputer complements existing national and cloud-based facilities, and offers academics and students greater flexibility when conducting their research. The arrival of the supercomputer is accompanied by a comprehensive training programme addressing the effective use of computing facilities.

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.’