Our vision
We foresee a future in which the physical and digital world become increasingly intertwined, and that will be founded on data, connectivity, and intelligence. We bring intelligence at the edge of the network, closer to its source, thereby reducing bandwith usage, latency and energy consumption, increasing privacy, and enhancing real-time analysis.
That is why we research and design sustainable and secure networks, systems, and intelligence at the EDGE.
From that vision, we cover 3 expertise areas:
Networks
We have expertise in various types of networks, such as the Internet, cellular (4G, 5G,& 6G) networks, other general purpose networks such as WiFi and Bluetooth, and networks for demanding applications or environments (e.g., vehicular, underwater, intra-body, satellite, industrial networks, and Internet of Things). Besides their architecture and design, we study their properties like security, performance, resilience, and sustainability. This expertise is mainly addressed by the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS), with networking and sensing at the edge also being performed by the Pervasive Systems group.
Systems
We have expertise in the design, prototyping, and inter-operation of systems at multiple scales, further driven by diverse non-functional performance metrics. Specifically, we work on designing technology and efficient architectures for embedded, high-performance, and cyber-physical systems, including architectures for efficient energy management in Smart Grids. We have expertise in the design of dependable computing systems, design automation for real-time embedded systems, and co-design of applications and computing continuum infrastructure towards zero-waste computing. This expertise is mainly addressed by the Computer Architecture for Embedded Systems (CAES) group.
Intelligence
We have expertise in systems that are composed of a network of collaborative sensing, computational, and reasoning components that are highly embedded in and actively – yet unobtrusively – interact with the environment. These massively distributed networks of smart objects communicate with one another and analyse and interpret the immense amount of low-level spatio-temporal information about the physical objects and environment to produce a representation of the overall environment. The combination of our leadership in smart sensing systems, wireless communication at the edge (sensor networks, extreme networking like underwater, underground, and vehicular) and embedded AI expertise is what makes us unique. This expertise is mainly represented by the Pervasive Systems research group.