“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.
In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.
Featured articles:
- De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
- Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
- Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)
A research team of ETRO was selected (under supervision of Prof. Johan Stiens and Dr. Bruno Da Silva) to participate to the I-LOVE-SCIENCE FESTIVAL (15-16-17/10/2021) in BRUSSELS with demos of wearable devices.
During the festival, the visitor will be introduced to various existing portable/wearable medical measuring instruments and their operating principles by Angel, Joan, Salar, Vlad, Bruno and Johan. The visitor will be able to experiment with various technologies to detect different physiological signals of his/her body under different conditions of activity. The measurement systems are specially designed for educational purposes, such that the user will also be able to change settings themselves and check their influence (a little engineering experience).
In addition to the technical-medical aspects, the social relevance will also be explained: how this measurement technology can contribute to preventive medicine, extremely important for social cost reduction of the health care costs.
ETRO’s Senior Business Development Manager Bugra Ersu was invited by Istanbul Project Management Institute to give a webinar on problems encountered in technology transfer projects.
A very productive event was held with the participation of more than 100 project professionals from different sectors.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6760177146632691712/
PROJECT: INTOWALL: detection of leaks and isolation in walls
Our buildings generate 35% of the CO2-emissions and 40% of the energy use. 75% of our buildings need to be energetically renovated. In order to do so, one needs to know what the status is of the current isolation, and if there are any water leaks. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel researches with a consortium of partners towards a unique, patented technique to look into the walls without breaking them. With a compact and mobile radar system you can “read” your walls. This project is part of the Smart Hub Cleantech, climate ambitions of the province and the communes.
Partners: Vrije Universiteit Brussel i.s.m. WTCB, Green Energy Park, BAM, ING, Flux50 en Alter Reim.
On June 6th 2024 at 16:00, Anirudh Praveen Kankuppe Raghavendra Swamy will defend their PhD entitled “LOW POWER MM-WAVE FMCW RADAR RECEIVERS IN V AND D BANDS”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01, or digitally via this link.
From the beginning of 20th Century, RADARs have been the cornerstone of the military arsenal. Radar has served as a prime sensing and tracking device and has evolved in complexity over time, while relying on simple modulation like FMCW (frequency-modulated continuous wave). Earlier radars started with operating frequencies of a few MHz, while modern radars operate at frequencies higher than 30 GHz, termed as mm-wave, to benefit from a large available bandwidth. While retaining their fundamental aspect of range and velocity sensing, today’s radars are found in diverse domestic areas like automotive, indoor sensing, human machine interface and vital signs monitoring. Though range and velocity sensing can be achieved with a single radar transceiver, to sense any angle of arrival, they must be arranged as MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) arrays. As the array size grows, it is paramount to have energy efficient array elements that do not compromise performance. The receiver of such an array should be resistant to leakage from the radar transmitter to the receiver termed as spillover. Otherwise, this spillover can result in saturation of the front-end or baseband circuitry in the receiver. Further, to have a better range resolution, the bandwidth of the front-end should be as high as possible. In this work, such a mm-wave radar receiver is explored with an emphasis on low power consumption, large RF bandwidth, robustness to spillover, and unique narrow-band filter for spillover or nearby large target attenuation. Two receivers were designed in a 28 nm bulk CMOS process, operating at 60 GHz (V-band) and 140 GHz (D- band) with a power consumption of 5.2 mW and 67 mW and a bandwidth of 10.2 GHz and 18.3 GHz, respectively. Core of the innovations aiding these state-of-the-art power consumption numbers are a mixer-first front-end architecture, a source-degenerated high-pass filter, a variable gain band-pass Gm-C filter, a low-power broadband I/Q RF front-end at D-band, and a unique, tunable narrow-band spillover and target attenuation filters. With this record low power consumption, the radars have been demonstrated to detect multi-targets, pedestrian movement, heartbeat and could filter selective targets in the range with a 13 mm range resolution marking a spot among state-of-the-art FMCW radar receivers and setting a benchmark for the future.
After the conservation and restoration project for Jan Van Eyck’s masterpiece, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage documented both sides of the painting with hundreds of macro photography photos. Universum Digitalis then algorithmically assembled those images to produce gigapixel images of the artwork. The painting was previously digitized in 2015 using the same scientific protocol. Universum Digitalis seamlessly aligned both acquisitions, enabling a unique pixel-level comparison before and after restoration.
Comparison of the front and backside before and after restoration.
The restored painting will be exhibited at The Louvre Museum during the exhibition “Revoir Van Eyck – La Vierge du chancelier Rolin” from March 20th to June 17th, 2024. In parallel with the exhibition’s opening, the gigapixel images produced by Universum Digitalis will be made publicly accessible on the Closer to Van Eyck website.
https://www.louvre.fr/en/what-s-on/exhibitions/a-new-look-at-jan-van-eyck
Several new buildings on Campus Oefenplein become operational.