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Researchers and artists are designing the future hybrid workplace

3 October 2023

Researchers and artists are designing the future hybrid workplace  

The research project called ‘REWORK’ aims at developing the digital meeting room to make human interaction feel more authentic and personal, much like in a physical meeting.

Photo: Kulturværftet/Thinkalike

In short time, the digital meeting room has become a common part of everyday life in many workplaces – a fast, easy, and convenient way to meet regardless of one’s location.

However, the hybrid workplace has its limitations, and therefore DIREC has decided to fund a research project involving researchers from Aarhus University, Copenhagen University, the IT University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University in the effort to develop future digital meeting solutions.

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Since the 1980s, Susanne has been designing the digital everyday lives in Denmark

2 October 2023

Since the 1980s, Susanne has been designing the digital everyday lives in Denmark  

Susanne Bødker’s research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has had a profound influence for decades on how we interact with technology in our daily lives and work lives. In 2001, she became the first Danish professor in new ways of working at the Center for New Ways of Working at Aarhus University.

Photo: Morten Koldby

IT solutions must be designed by people for people: digital tools must be intuitive to use and make a difference in our daily lives. In fact, technological solutions should be an extension of human abilities, without us thinking about it.

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a key role in the technology that surrounds us every day, and for the way the labour market develops, so that new IT solutions can support human use in the best possible way.

One of Denmark’s leading researchers in the HCI field is Susanne Bødker, a computer science professor at Aarhus University, honored multiple times for her research in human-machine interaction.

Since the 1980s, the researcher from Aarhus has worked to design the Danes’ digital everyday lives and working lives, so that technology develops in a constructive way and takes a critical approach to challenges and opportunities.

Currently, she is particularly interested in how hybrid work challenges companies and employees, and fundamentally changes the interaction and relationship between people in a workplace, for better or worse.

– Hybrid work is becoming increasingly widespread, so we must be critical of the technology’s possibilities and limitations, and of the way we organize ourselves and perform management. For example, when a workplace with several hundred employees decides to enable all kinds of activities to take place hybridly in future, it places new demands on personnel management. It changes the nature of work and meetings when employees must be able always to participate remotely. It affects what can be shared with each other, when and how. In fact, it changes everything that participants see, hear, and experience because on the screen, we are still just ‘flat people’, says Susanne Bødker.

Take a critical and investigative look at your organization

When advising organizations on how to best set up as a modern hybrid workplace, it involves considering both the technology, the physical environment, and the management aspects of hybrid work.

– Companies have very different challenges, and the technology must be considered in the specific context. Are you a software company with employees all over the world, struggling with people who do not want to move to Aarhus? Are you a bank looking to replace physical customer meetings with online meetings? Do you simply want people to have the freedom to work from home and only to show up physically at the office a few days a week? In that case, it will be necessary to organize differently so that people work at the office on the same days. Every company needs to address its own reality and current challenges.

Her many years of research in user interfaces and user experiences have led to new methods and theories that have gained international attention. In 2017, she received an ERC Advanced Grant of over 2 million euros from the European Research Council for research in user interfaces for complex human use of computers and the research project “Common Interactive Objects.” The goal was to investigate the possibility of building open and shareable platforms and communities on the user’s terms – and not on the terms of the computer systems.

Recently, she has been participating in the ReWork project, funded by the Digital Research Centre Denmark. ReWork is a multidisciplinary research project where researchers, several companies, and three recognized artists explore the future of the hybrid workplace and, not least, technologies that support aspects such as human needs, work with relationship and articulation, as well as embodiment and presence.

Inspires more women to pursue a career in information and technology

As one of the few female computer scientists and top researchers in Denmark, she has inspired more young women to choose an IT career, over the years. A theme that is important to her. Therefore, she has been active as a member of the diversity committee at Aarhus University. 

One of her strong arguments to young women is that the development in the information and technology field is fundamental to the development and the future of our society. Therefore, as a computer scientist you can look forward to getting influence, good well-paid jobs, and a high degree of freedom.

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A PhD project was the launch pad – now the research team is heading toward an international breakthrough

9 August 2023

A PhD project was the launch pad – now the research team is heading toward an international breakthrough  

“This can go far” a team of researchers from Aarhus University realized when a PhD project turned out to have great application potential. The project became the launch pad for the company Coana, which is now heading toward an international breakthrough in JavaScript and open source technology.

It all started as a research project when Martin Torp and Benjamin Barslev, both PhDs from the Dept. of Computer Science at Aarhus University, created the foundation for the software company Coana.

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An interdisciplinary workshop on AI attracts international top researchers to Denmark – do you want to join?

9 August 2023

An interdisciplinary workshop on AI attracts international top researchers to Denmark - do you want to join?

DIREC invites to a high calibre research meeting with the workshop ‘Verifiable and Robust AI’ in November.

At the workshop, which takes place at Sandbjerg Gods in Sønderborg on 6-10 November, Danish and international top researchers in the fields of AI, machine learning and formal methods will gather – and we can guarantee plenty of interesting discussions and exchange of experience across disciplines.

So says Associate Professor Manfred Jaeger from the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University, who is one of the organizers behind the workshop.

– With the workshop ‘Verifiable and robust AI’ we would like to bring two groups of researchers closer together – on the one hand some of Denmark’s strongest experts in machine learning and AI – and on the other hand experts in the formal analysis processes, correctness and security in programming.

– These are two relatively different types of researchers who do not usually meet at shared events – one group is particularly interested in formal methods and with a highly theoretical and mathematical focus, while the AI/machine learning experts also have a mathematical focus, but they use other techniques, Manfred Jaeger explains. The aim is to create new professional networks and hopefully to initiate more collaborations across the universities.

– There are possibly people in Copenhagen who can benefit from a collaboration with researchers from Aalborg or Aarhus University and vice versa. We want to help establish new relations, says Manfred Jaeger, who is looking forward to welcoming a series of interesting keynotes from foreign top universities – Moshe Vardi from Rice University, Jan Krêtínský from the Technical University of Munich and Bernhard Steffen from TU Dortmund University to name just three of the main names.

– The workshop addresses researchers from all universities in Denmark – we hope for a strong participation from the Danish research communities, so that people who do normally not participate in the same workshops and conferences will have the opportunity to meet each other.

Boris Düdder from the University of Copenhagen (KU), Thomas Hildebrandt, KU, Jaco van de Pol, Aarhus University (AU), Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Aalborg University (AAU), Manfred Jaeger (AAU) are the organizers of the workshop, which is sponsored by DIREC.

Read more and sign up here

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Hacker attacks are accelerating considerably – researchers work to close security threats in IoT systems

6 July 2023

Hacker attacks are accelerating considerably

– researchers work to close security threats in IoT systems

The increase of IoT devices has exposed vulnerabilities in physical devices connected to the Internet. Even defibrillators known from the street life can be the target of hacker attacks. An ongoing DIREC project aims to strengthen security and protect data.

With the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more physical objects are connected to the Internet so that they can communicate with each other and with people.

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Explainable AI will disrupt the grain industry and give farmers confidence

4 July 2023

Explainable AI will disrupt the grain industry and give farmers confidence  

There is a huge potential for AI in the agricultural sector as a large part of food quality assurance is still handled manually. The aim of a research project is to strengthen understanding of and trust in AI and image analysis, which can improve quality assurance, food quality and optimize production.

One of the mayor barriers for using AI and image analysis in the agricultural and food industry is to create confidence that it works. Today, the manual visual inspection of grain remains one of the most important quality assurance procedures throughout the value chain to bring grain from field to table – and to ensure that the farmers get the right price for their grain.

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Maja conducts research into green algorithms: All projects count

15 June 2023

Maja conducts research into green algorithms: All projects matter  

Maja Hanne Kirkeby is Associate Professor at Roskilde University (RUC) and works closely with companies and other researchers to develop more energy efficient software solutions.

A DIREC project on green algorithms last year was the starting point for a number of new research projects and subsequently a close collaboration with the IT company Nine A/S.

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Cyber systems collaboration could help bring “lab on a chip” into the real world

13 June 2023

Cyber systems collaboration could help bring "lab on a chip" into the real world  

By Søren Bjørn-Hansen

Getting a complex piece of hardware to work with all the variables of the real world is difficult. But through a DIREC-project collaboration, Luca Pezzarossa got much closer to having a working prototype.

Photo: Bax Lindhardt

For most people the term digital microfluidics doesn’t mean a whole lot. But it’s a technology which could revolutionise lab work completely.

“The idea is that whatever a biochemist normally spends a lot of time doing with pipettes, can be done by a chip instead,” Luca Pezzarossa explains and plays a short video of the technology at work.

The lab on a chip is basically a biochemical lab scaled down to the size of a small portable device. The idea is to make tiny droplets of fluid move around on a chip by activating a sequence of electrodes. Luca Pezzarossa’s job is to make the hardware and software work together to move the microfluidic droplets the right way.

“But one thing that is very common in this field is that the people who do this research are not biochemists, ” he says.

The problem with this is that there are real-world constraints, which makes moving the droplets much harder.

“Two droplets cannot go as close as they do in a simulation, because they would touch and merge. Or from a biological point of view, some droplets might leave behind a contaminating residue. Blood that leaves a trail for example, and so other droplets cannot move where this has moved earlier,” Luca Pezzarossa explains.

This represents a difficult problem. To translate from a high-level protocol that is user-friendly – something which is useful for a biochemist – down to a controlling sequence is very difficult. Especially when the constraints are complex real-world issues, like a droplet leaving a contaminating trail of blood on the chip.

“When I presented these challenges at a DIREC seminar, two algorithm-oriented scientists said: ‘This is very cool from a theoretical point of view. We should apply for a DIREC Explore project.’ And we did,” Luca Pezzarossa says.

Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC) supports multidisciplinary research – often with external partners – with the so called Explore projects, which are small agile research projects with the purpose of screening new ideas.

So for most of 2022 he worked with two fellow assistant professors, Eva Rotenberg from DTU Compute and Lene Monrad Favrholdt from University of Southern Denmark, on developing algorithms that could do this scheduling and routing on applied cyber-physical systems – while DTU research assistant Kasper Skov Johansen, who is now a PhD student at DTU, did most of the practical work.

Photo: Bax Lindhardt

“We ended up building a mathematical framework to describe the constraints. What are the different boundaries and rules these droplets need to respect?”, he explains.

They have laid out the ideas and know where they want to take the project next. Now they are looking for funding. Long term their goal is to make the lab on a chip better so it works well in the real world instead of in a simulation.

Luca Pezzarossa believes a prototype is a couple of years away. But it all depends on how the users of the lab on a chip react.

“When people start using something they will tell you ‘this shouldn’t behave like that’. But that is the point. To try to do something useful and not just move coloured droplets around. Some issues you only discover when you bring things into the real world,” he says.

Through their collaboration, the team discovered that developing the right algorithms was much more complex than they thought. They only partially succeeded in creating the right algorithms. And that is okay, he thinks:

“It’s a difficult problem to solve. And that is also the purpose of DIREC Explore. You explore an idea, and you see if there is more that you can do. And in this case, there was more. Which is why we are looking for more funding.”

According to Luca Pezzarossa the DIREC Explore project was essential because it got them thinking differently.

“We tried to bring two worlds together that are very different. I’m from the embedded systems world, which is very noisy and real. We build things inside rockets and cars. But the world of algorithms is very formal and abstract at the same time. And this, I think, was one of the aims of the explore project, to bring people together from different fields,” he says and continues:

“I learned a lot about communication and the need to explain things in a common language. It is sometimes difficult, but so worth it. Otherwise, you are in your perfect box with all the things you know. Which is also good research, in principle. But the real world isn’t really made out of clean boxes.”

Luca Pezzarossa is an assistant professor at DTU Compute. He first arrived at DTU from his native Italy on an Erasmus Exchange Program in 2012. He did his master thesis at DTU two years later and has been at DTU ever since.

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A commercial mindset is just as important as a good idea

7 June 2023

A commercial mindset is just as important as a good idea

DIREC works to ensure that Denmark gets more university-based tech startups, and there is plenty of inspiration to be gained from successful entrepreneurs such as Chief Physician Søren Andreas Just and Professor of Medical Robotics from SDU, Thiusius Rajeeth Savarimuthu. They are co-founders of the company ROPCA and the robot Arthur, which will revolutionize everyday life in busy hospital wards.

Thiusius Rajeeth Savarimuthu (left) and Søren Andreas Just, founders of ROPCA

The robot Arthur scans patients who are suspected of having rheumatoid arthritis. By scanning a patient’s hands, the robot can quickly determine whether there are signs of rheumatoid arthritis or not and thus assess whether the patient should enter a course of treatment. For patients already diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, Arthur can see if there are any signs of disease activity.

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Data detects irregularities before things go wrong

25 May 2023

Data detects irregularities before things go wrong  

A defect at a processing plant in Brazil meant that production was at a standstill for three days. The incident has prompted SANOVO TECHNOLOGY GROUP to invest time and data in a DIREC research project, which involves machine learning and IoT with the aim of preventing similar breakdowns in the future.

Time was precious when a critical machine component broke down and the new spare part had to be shipped all the way from SANOVO in Denmark to Brazil, where the processing plant was idle in the meantime.

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