WHERE THE FUTURE LIES

KTH Royal Institute of Technology has served as one of Europe’s key centres of innovation and intellectual talent for almost two hundred years. Recognised as Sweden’s most prestigious technical university, KTH is also the country’s oldest and largest. Education and research spans from natural sciences to all the branches of engineering and includes architecture, industrial management and urban planning.

In 2016 I wrote the research articles for the yearbooks for both the School of Electrical Engineering and for the School of Industrial Management.

School of Electrical Engineering articles:

• Independent communication between robots
• Automising stem cell research
• The algorithm at the heart of automated truck safety
• 'Human organs on a chip' technology
• Sustainable power development

CONTINUING THE COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION

Remember the time before smartphones and ‘mobile solutions’, before all the talk of autonomous systems and the Internet of Things? Remember when there was no 2, 3 or 4G? Remember wires, everywhere.

"I remember when, perhaps twenty years ago, what we were doing here was seen as interesting but too expensive to develop." Reflects Mikael Skoglund, Head of the Department of Information Science and engineering and vice dean of the school of Electrical Engineering at KTH.

For the past twenty years both he and his colleague, Professor of Signal Processing and program director for the MSc program in Wireless Systems, Mats Bengtsson have been performing both theoretical as well as experimental research, using numerous tools from information, communication, and coding theory to signal processing, machine learning and statistical physics to further develop wireless networks.

Skoglund and Bengtsson along with colleagues and students have worked to develop a technology we have come to take for granted, a technology which becomes more reliable, trusted, able, efficient and capable with each new ‘generation’. By the time we arrived at ‘3G’ enabled mobile devices they had capabilities that made it possible for us to access everything, almost anywhere. The wireless networking capability gave birth to the “smartphone”. It was easy to play games, send videos and images. Microblogging and sharing numerous selfies had become part of our everyday lives. This was all made possible from rapid, constant data transfer.

The next leap in wireless technology, 4G, became known as ‘mobile broadband anywhere and everywhere’ and it changed the atomic unit of the web from images to videos. Skoglund and Bengtsson, as well as colleagues and students, were involved from the start and between 2000 and 2010 they worked on 4G development. Their work was given a boost when in 2004 the European Commission began the project Wireless World Initiative New Radio (WINNER) whose aim it was to define the fourth generation radio standard. WINNER united 4G industry and researchers from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. By 2010 4G was a reality and the European Commission decided to invest 18 million Euros in the further development of the technology. Overall, the years 2007-2013 saw the EU invest more than €700 million into research on future networks, half of which was allocated to wireless technologies contributing to the development of 4G and beyond 4G networks.

The work on 4G has been a resounding success. Aside from download and streaming speeds, it has been a success from a societal point of view. It has led to a decrease in the digital divide between urban and rural communities. Worldwide standardisation has meant the use of a single technology from across the world without changes between Europe the United States and Japan- areas which previously all operated on separate systems. The internet on our phones is now taken for granted, and mobile internet usage, in 2016, surpassed desktop usage for the first time. 80 percent of time spent on social media is

spent on mobile devices and social media itself has been supercharged from Snapchat stories to the 8bn video views on Facebook per day.

When asked about their role in the development of this disruptive and enabling technology Skoglund explains that it was, “Through our research, networking and working on the huge European projects that we contributed.”

Looking to the future we can glimpse just how the work done by Bengtsson, Skoglund and the EE School continues to have an impact. Both 4G and now 5G have been influenced not only by the work of Skoglund and Bengtsson but also by their former Phd students, now working with major telecommunication companies such as Ericsson and Huawei. Already in the early 2010’s Skoglund and Bengtsson were involved in the development of the new 5G technology. WINNER was soon followed by another European project, the Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020) Information Society (METIS). METIS, a consortium of 29 partners focusing on developing a concept for 5G was coordinated by Ericsson whereas WINNER was led by Siemens. This time the technical objective was to develop a concept for the future mobile and wireless communications system that would support the connected information society.

“5G will be different again,” Says Skoglund. “If you browse the internet over the phone a two-second delay can be okay, but if you wish to control a robot over wireless or an autonomous car, the requirements on real-time and reliable communication are much tougher. 4G can’t deliver that.”

We should be in no doubt that 5G technology will be transformative. It will affect most industries, and will supercharge virtual and artificial reality. The Department of Information Science and Engineering has made its mark on the way in which we live our lives today and will continue to have an influence on how we will live them tomorrow.

This article was originally published in KTH a piece of history

https://www.antonywrites.com/home/2017/12/29/continuing-the-communication-revolution

EXACTLY WHERE THE PHYSICS IS HAPPENING

The keen observation of the night sky has long been a recognised part of Swedish scientific life, now we’re closer than ever to understanding it.

From the earliest days, the night sky — particularly the colourful aurora borealis — seen prominently over northern Scandinavia, has sparked curiosity.

Over time, this curiosity sharpened into scientific fact-based research. The naked eye was soon assisted by ground-based observations from magnetometers, all-sky cameras, and radars. In time, first sounding rockets and then satellites were launched to further investigate in situ the physical mechanisms behind the aurora, such as acceleration of auroral particles, needed to create the intense auroral displays, and the mechanisms driving the aurora.

Scientists at KTH have long played an internationally key role in the studies of the aurora and the auroral particle acceleration. Both Göran Marklund, professor of Space Plasma Physics at KTH and Per-Arne Lindqvist, research scientist in the same field, have studied the aurora and the mechanisms behind it since the late1970s.

“We often call our research ‘auroral research’. But the aurora is not the result of processes confined only to the Earth’s ionosphere where it is observed, but the result of a long chain of interaction processes between the Sun and the Earth’s magnetosphere. As the continuously emitted, highly variable solar wind hits the Earth’s magnetosphere, a process named reconnection will transfer energy and momentum between particles and magnetic fields. To further understand this process, in situ measurements by satellites crossing the magnetosphere’s outer boundary are needed.” Says Lindqvist as the two scientists explain their role in the continued study of an ever more vital area of space physics.

Electromagnetic hydrodynamic waves (or magneto-hydrodynamic waves) play an important role in the above mentioned processes behind the aurora. They were first described in 1942 by former KTH professor, Hannes Alfvén (1908 – 1995). As an electrical engineer and plasma physicist he had long promoted his theories on electromagnetic hydrodynamic waves and although at first not universally accepted, his theories were soon fully recognised and now these waves are commonly referred to as ‘Alfvén waves’. It is his pioneering work, recognised with a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970, that has continued in earnest at KTH.

The success of the launch of Sweden’s first satellite VIKING in 1986, and its achievements as the first satellite to explore plasma processes in the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere led not only to successive satellites FREJA and ASTRID-2 and their further investigations, but also to a recognition from the international community that Sweden had a serious research capability and a frontier position in the field.

“We showed the world that we were capable of designing and building advanced rocket and satellite experiments which worked.” Says Marklund. Confidence had grown internationally in the ability of Swedish space science, and engineers, to not only execute exacting experiments but also to build highly precise electric field instruments.

So when scientists at KTH learnt that NASA was getting a team together for a space physics project which would involve four satellites to launch in 2015, the KTH team worked hard on their contribution to a project close to their heart. The Magneto-spheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission was targeted to deepen our understanding of the process of reconnection operating between the solar wind and many of the planets, including Earth. Magnetic reconnection, transferring energy and momentum between particles and magnetic fields, is a well-known process also in fusion plasmas, solar flares and probably also in astrophysical plasma jets.

A key parameter in this process is the electric field. The world-leading position of the KTH group in measuring electric fields was the reason for being invited to provide the spin-plane double probe electric field experiments on the four MMS spacecraft. So it was that on 13 March 2015, after 10 years of hard work on a 1-billion dollar NASA mission, an Atlas V 421 rocket entered space carrying their instruments. All three components of the electric field in the earth’s magnetosphere are now being measured with the highest resolution possible and frontier science is already being explored. As a result of this large scientific effort, “close to 400 papers have been published in international journals with many authors to each paper.” Says Lindqvist.

So what’s next for Space Physics at KTH? We discussed several new projects including one which Marklund and Lindqvist acknowledge will probably not be complete until after they have retired.

“We are moving away from the earth’s magnetosphere to explore other regions.” Explains Lindqvist. “One project, which we are involved in, and which is already on its way to be launched, is BepiColombo. It will go to Mercury, carrying an electric field instrument we have built. There will be two spacecraft, one will observe the planet and the other is a magnetospheric orbiter which will measure the electric fields, in situ around the planet Mercury, for the first time ever.”

Almost by way of further explanation, and especially to clarify the importance of the study of in situ space physics, Marklund explains. “Astronomers are forced to rely only on the light in different wavelengths emitted from stars, however, our in situ measurements are from exactly where the physics is happening, where there are electric fields, particles and currents, that is a real contrast between us and the astronomers.”

EDUCATION: ENGINEERING THE PERFECT BALANCE

Engineers have been trained at KTH Royal Institute of Technology for over 100 years. Teaching practice has always evolved and adapted both with the college and society at large. Today, striking a balance between theory and practical experience is at the centre of the most recent education reforms.

The balance ensures that the university delivers professionals with relevant practical experience, in addition to being schooled in the fundamental scientific rigour that must underpin that practice. However, a balance between science and practice has not always been to the aim of the university.

Post-world war one KTH was a very different institution to today’s university. If you were to visit you would have found a male-dominated training college, much more of a ‘workshop’ with an apprenticeship style. Similar to today’s facility it was a proud institution in which students could expect the best training in the latest methods when studying in fields such as materials science. But it was certainly, without question, more traditionally focused. Training was rooted in the apprenticeship system for tradesmen. Water engineers could for instance make use of the special V-shaped building (known as the trouser legs) where the basement of one ‛leg’ had large water channels that could be used for various experiments. It was very much a ‘hands-on’ school.

However, after time it had become clear that the school was going to need to move towards more theory. And so in 1867 “scientific training” was entered into the university’s statutes. Theory began to occupy more space in the curriculum.

A leap forward and we find ourselves in the 1990s, and now the tables have very much turned. By this time there were very few internships being offered by industry and the practical requirement for a degree was removed altogether. At KTH many professors themselves had little or no practical experience and theoretical work and research became all dominant.

“In engineering education in the 1990s there was nothing about conceiving, there was nothing about implementing or operating, it was all design or calculations.” Says Joakim Lilliesköld, Associate Professor in Industrial Systems Engineering, and the man responsible for education at the School of Electrical Engineering. Critics were also looking to engineering colleges around the world and feeling that the focus on the profession was being left behind. In the US, Boeing the multinational corporation and engineering giant, had made the observation that they were unhappy with the graduates that they were getting. As Lilliesköld describes it “they, as well as many other companies, were not really happy with the engineers that came out of the system, they wanted to see a change in their education so that they would get more practice into it and they took a systems approach to how to re-train them.” It was out of this that the ‘CDIO’ method was born in the early 2000s. The method focuses on

four key areas that the students need to work with in order to become rounded engineers; Conception, Design, Implementation, and Operation.

“CDIO was a project funded by Wallenberg where they provided money to three Swedish university’s; Chalmers, Linkoping and KTH, and M.I.T in the US – the goal was to educate engineers that can engineer,” says Lilliesköld.

CDIO said that engineering programmes needed to have all four fundamental puzzle pieces. Additionally, it was realised that for the ‘hands-on’ aspect, project courses would also need to be added to the curriculum. Lilliesköld explains how the model was added to and adjusted, “another dimension was realised – that you had to have a progression of skills. So a long set of engineering skills was developed, you needed to be able to work in a team, to do a project plan, to be able to communicate. All of the skills of the engineer were examined.” A key feature of CDIO was the way in which it was ‘baked in’, the skills were not taught separately — there was not a project management course or a technical writing course — they were integrated into the actual technical courses. CDIO has continued to develop and the curriculum at KTH’s School of Electrical Engineering has adapted and evolved.

At KTH this most recent evolution of education started in 1999 when the first year project course began. According to Lilliesköld it created a lot of discussions as to whether or not you could present an application before all relevant theories were known. Another issue was the product focus of CDIO, in early 2000 it was difficult for many at the department to talk about products for Electrical Engineering. Then something changed. Project courses were developed in many of the master programs. In 2007, the bachelor thesis was added to the curricula as a result of the Bologna reform. 10 years later, the next step was taken to introduce a more challenging project course in the 2nd year at the bachelor level. Then, in 2013 the curriculum was rebuilt. The result was a program to create world-class electrical engineers. A course with both a strong theoretical base and one project each year to tie the theoretical courses together. Additionally, there is a course called Global Impact of Electrical Engineering that looks at future challenges and introduces students to a mentor from the faculty. As Lilliesköld says, “Altogether, students now leave with a good mix of skills, ready for the demands of 21st-century industry.