Projects are the key driver in DIREC. In total, we have initiated more than 40 projects. All projects are collaboration projects between several partners.
Bridge projects are multidisciplinary research and innovation projects directed by DIREC researchers in collaboration with companies, the public sector and GTS institutes with the aim of increasing the companies’ digitalisation and innovation capacity.
Spin-qubit quantum-dot arrays are one of the most promising candidates for universal quantum computing. However, with the size of the arrays, a bottleneck has emerged: Tuning the many control parameters of an array by hand is time-consuming and very expensive. The nascent spin-qubit industry needs a platform of algorithms that can be fine-tuned to specific sensing hardware, and which allows cold-start tuning of a device.
Building an internet voting system is not easy: The design of new cryptographic protocols is error-prone, and public trust in the elected body is easily threatened. Together with an industrial partner, this project aims to improve the security and quality of the internet voting system and influence regulation on minimum quality requirements for blockchains.
Together with industrial partners, this project will investigate production scenarios where a machine can be operated by untrained personnel by using low-code development for adaptive and re-configurable robot programming of logistic tasks.
There is constant interest for Internet Voting by election commissions around the world. Greenland illustrates this well. Greenland’s election law was changed in 2020, which now permits the use of Internet Voting. Together with the authorities in Greenland, this project will investigate the effects of program verification on public trust in election technologies. The project aims to contribute to making internet elections more credible, which can strengthen developing and post-conflict democracies around the world.
Based on observations of the Earth, a range of Danish public organizations build and maintain important data foundations that are used for decision-making, e.g., for executing environmental law or making planning decisions in both private and public organizations in Denmark. This project aims to support the digital acceleration of the green transition by strengthening the data foundation for environmental data.
Remote and hybrid work will certainly be part of most work practices, but what should these future work practices look like? Should we merely attempt to fix what we already have or can we be bolder and speculate a different kind of workplace future? Together with companies, this project seeks a vision of the future that integrates hybrid work experiences with grace and decency.
IoT devices are blending into the infrastructure of both society and our personal lives. However, many of these devices run in uncontrolled, potentially hostile environments, which makes them vulnerable to security attacks. Moreover, with the increasing number of safety critical IoT devices, such as medical and industrial IoT devices, IoT security is a public safety issue.
Embedded AI will revert the current AI processing flow from collecting data at the edge and processing it at the cloud, to a flow where AI algorithms are migrated from the cloud to a distributed network of AI enabled edge-devices, which will increase responsiveness and functionality, reduced data transfer, and increased resilience, security, and privacy.
How can we leverage the potential benefits of having multiple robots working in parallel to reduce time to completion? If robots are given the task collectively as a swarm, they could potentially coordinate their operation on the fly and adapt based on local conditions to achieve optimal or near-optimal task performance. Together with industrial partners, this project aims to address multi-robot collaboration and design and evaluate technological solutions that enable users to engage and control autonomous multi-robot systems.
Together with clinicians, this project aims to develop explanatory AI that can help medical staff make qualified decisions by taking the role as a mentor who provides feedback and advice for the clinicians. It is important that the explainable AI provides good explanations that are easy to understand and utilize during the medical staff’s workflow.
Together with industry, the project aims to develop methods and tools that enable industry to develop new efficient solutions for exploiting the huge amount of business data generated by enterprise systems, with specific focus on tools and responsible methods for the use of process insights for business intelligence and transformation.
Together with industry, this project aims to develop methods and tools that enable the industry to develop new efficient solutions for exploiting the huge amount of business data generated by enterprise and blockchain systems, with specific focus on tools and responsible methods for the use of process insights for business intelligence and transformation.
Both society and industry have a substantial interest in well-functioning outdoor and indoor mobility infrastructures that are efficient, predictable, environmentally friendly, and safe. For outdoor mobility, reduction of congestion is high on the political agenda as is the reduction of CO2 emissions, as the transportation sector is the second largest in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. For indoor mobility, corridors and elevators represent bottlenecks for mobility in large building complexes.
Today, manual visual inspection of grain is still one of the most important quality assurance procedures throughout the value chain of bringing cereals from the field to the table. Together with FOSS, this project aims to develop and validate a method of automated imaging-based solutions that can replace subjective manual inspection and improve performance, robustness and consistency of the inspection.
Downtime of equipment is costly and a source of safety, security and legal issues. Today, organisations adopt a conservative schedule of preventive maintenance independent of the condition of equipment. This results in unnecessary service costs and occasional interruptions of production due to unexpected failures.
The rapidly growing application of machine learning techniques in cyber-physical systems leads to better solutions and products in terms of adaptability, performance, efficiency, functionality and usability. However, cyber-physical systems are often safety critical, e.g., self-driving cars or medical devices, and the need for verification against potentially fatal accidents is of key importance.
Strategic, multidisciplinary research projects directed by DIREC researchers – often in collaboration with external partners – aim to deliver value for both the scientific world and society. The purpose of the SciTech projects is to expand the research and education capacity at the universities.
Our focus is on improving optimization algorithms in online decision-making. Using techniques from online algorithms for solving optimization problems, we can provide worst-case guarantees, but normal (averagecase) behavior may not be satisfactory. Using techniques from machine learning, we can often provide good behavior in practice, but guarantees are lacking, and in particular missing for situations not captured by the training data. We aim at combining the best features from these two areas.
The search for nearest neighbors is an emerging and increasingly vital component in data analysis tasks, for example using vector embedding databases. Typically, the search is the bottleneck in terms of efficiency. Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search methods are often employed to speed up the application. However, different methods for ANN search come with different biases that can be positive or negative for the downstream application. In this project, the bias of different ANN methods and its impact on different applications will be studied.
There is an unmet need for decentralised privacy-preserving machine learning. Cloud computing has great potential, however, there is a lack of trust in the service providers and there is a risk of data breaches. A lot of data are private and stored locally for good reasons, but combining the information in a global machine learning system could lead to services that benefit all.
AI is radically changing society and the main driver behind new AI methods and systems is machine learning. Machine learning focuses on finding solutions for, or patterns in, new data by learning from relevant existing data. Thus, machine learning algorithms are often applied to large datasets and then they more or less autonomously find good solutions by finding relevant information or patterns hidden in the data.
Strategic, multidisciplinary research projects directed by DIREC researchers – often in collaboration with external partners – aim to deliver value for both the scientific world and society. The Explore projects are small agile research projects with the purpose of screening new ideas.
Constructing cyber-physical systems with humans in the loop is important in many application areas to enable a close co-operation between humans and machines. However, there are also many challenges to overcome when constructing such systems with current software technologies and human-centered design approaches.
A robot database with information on previous robot solutions can save manufacturing companies time and money and allow for smaller-scale companies to automate their production as well. This is the conclusion of the ReRoPro project. Although it sounds simple, there are several challenges involved with creating a robot database. With input from industry and international experts, the researchers have now gained a much better understanding of the challenges.
A recurring problem of digitalised industries is to design and coordinate hybrid systems that include IoT (Internet of Things), edge, and cloud solutions. Currently adopted methods and tools are not effective to this end, because they rely too much on informal specifications that are manually written and interpreted by humans.
Several highly popular YouTube channels for mathematics and other scientific content (e.g., 3blue1brown, Numberphile, Veritasium) with millions of views indicate that learners may respond very positively to professionally produced educational videos. This project aims at creating and evaluating an initial library of such videos to supplement teaching in algorithms.
We will investigate how to combine secure multiparty computation and blockchain techniques to obtain more efficient privacy-preserving computation with accountability.
As cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are becoming ever more ubiquitous, many of them are considered safetycritical. We want to help CPS manufacturers and regulators with establishing high levels of trust in automatically synthesized control software for safety-critical CPSs.
The overall purpose of this project is to define, investigate, and provide preliminary methodologies for scheduling and routing microliter-sized liquid droplets on a planar surface in the context of digital microfluidics.
Sensitivity measures how much program outputs vary when changing inputs. We propose exploring novel methodologies for specifying and verifying sensitivity properties of probabilistic programs.
This project will quantify the biases and uncertainties associated with human mobility data collected through digital means, such a smartphone GPS traces, cell phone data, and social media data.
Effect systems are currently a hot research subject in type theory. Yet many effect systems, whilst powerful, are very complicated to use, particularly by programmers that are not experts at type theory. Effect systems with inference can provide useful guarantees to programming languages, while being simple enough to be used in practice by everyday programmers.
Computing devices consume a considerable amount of energy. Implementing algorithms in hardware using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be more energy efficient than executing them in software in a processor. This project explores classic sorting and path-finding algorithms and compare their energy efficiency and performance when implemented in hardware.
Artificial Intelligence brings the promise of technological means to solve problems that previously were assumed to require human intelligence, and ultimately provide human-centered solutions that are both more effective and of higher quality in a synergy between the human and the AI system than solutions that are provided by humans or by an AI system alone.
The aim is to supplement and create synergy with the existing education programs at all universities in Denmark, promote gender diversity and strengthen the cooperation between researchers, students and the business community to ensure the best possible exploitation of the capacity.
Denmark needs more IT specialists. But how do we get more young people to study computer science and become IT specialist? This project, consisting of two subprojects, focuses on initiatives that can improve both recruitment and retention of a larger but also more diverse group of young people e.g., female students and students without prior programming experience.
The aim is to improve onboarding and retention of students result in an ability to teach more students and lower dropout rates.
Teaching quality and student feedback is negatively impacted by lack of teachers and many students. There is a need to consider how learning technologies can help improve teaching quality and student feedback both in physical and digital learning environments.
The mix of students in digital technology is low in diversity (e.g. female students). This is a problem on a societal level which also impacts the study environment.
We are actively in dialog with all our partners about creating new projects that will fullfill the goal of DIREC. If you have an idea for a project, please contact us to hear about potential collaboration.
