“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.
Arno Hemelhof finalized his first tape-out in InP Teledyne technology, paving the path towards sustainable IC for 6G communication
Gaurav is one of the two winners of 2020-21 International Student Circuit Contest by IEEE Solid-state Circuits society. Gaurav solved the problem below:
Provide an example of an amplifier where, despite the presence of a positive feedback, the system cannot latch since the topology guarantees always a positive gain margin (regardless the components values or mismatches)? In your answer please clarify the expression of the loop gain and show that there is actually a positive feedback but the magnitude can never exceed one.
On September 22nd 2025 at 16:00, Thibaut Vandervelden will defend their PhD entitled “RUST-BASED IOT NETWORKS: A NETWORK PROTOCOL AND SECURITY PERSPECTIVE”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room I.2.01 or online via this link.
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to transform our interconnected world. Its rapid growth raises significant concerns about privacy and security. In recent years, numerous IoT botnets have exploited vulnerabilities in embedded devices to launch large-scale Distributed Denial of Service attacks. These attacks have caused significant disruption to internet services worldwide.
Many of these security vulnerabilities come from the use of memory-unsafe programming languages, such as C and C++. Programming languages with built-in safety features can mitigate these vulnerabilities. Since its first stable release in 2015, Rust has emerged as a popular choice for system programming, gaining popularity due to its unique combination of memory safety guarantees while keeping its performance comparable to the one obtained with traditional programming languages. Developers have successfully deployed Rust across diverse domains, including Operating Systems (OSs), web services, and embedded devices.
For IoT devices, two software components are particularly important: the OS and the network stack enabling communication. We provide an evaluation of OSs and frameworks for embedded devices available in Rust and examine their suitability for various IoT applications. We also investigate the feasibility and advantages of implementing a complete network stack in Rust for resource-constrained embedded devices. We built on the smoltcp library and extended it with a Rust implementation of IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). We studied and implemented the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). We developed and applied an evaluation methodology to check compliance with the standard and to verify interoperability with existing implementations. Doing so, we solved several issues of the current RPL implementation in ContikiNG. Our research also evaluates the effectiveness of 6LoWPAN generic header compression for use in RPL networks. The results demonstrate that this compression format significantly reduces energy consumption for IEEE 802.15.4-based networks that offer low data rates. For higher data rates, the benefit of this compression format diminishes.
Alongside contributing to networking components in Rust, we also explored security primitives. We evaluated the performance of different Keccak sponge constructions, cryptographic primitives that can serve as building blocks for various security protocols. Our findings reveal that Keccak sponge constructions with lower capacity parameters achieve significantly better efficiency on 32-bit microcontrollers commonly used in IoT devices. Building on these insights, we design and implement two novel symmetric-key-based authentication protocols. One tailored for wireless sensor networks and the other for fog based networks. We demonstrate that our protocol provides robust protection against known attacks while maintaining low computational and communication overhead.
Selene De Sutter started her PhD at ETRO in 2019. Since childhood she suffers from Diabetes type 1 and she received an insulin pump for treating this. The choice of following the Master Biomedical Engineering was obvious, so that she could develop technologies that would help people with medical conditions, like the insulin pump did for her. If Selene did not choose for am Engineering training you could have met her on stage, as she was hesitating to follow a Jazz training. Now she combines Engineering Sciences with music as a hobby.
The program creates lots of possibilities so that you have a lot of options. It starts general and you can choose options along the go according to your interests. It does take some perseverance though!
Biomedical Imaging was the course Selene liked most in the master Biomedical Engineering. A very visual kind of programming that showed its usefulness in practice immediately. It also became her topic for her PhD which is her next big goal. What will happen after the PhD is not clear yet, but she wants to work on something useful and enjoy what she is doing.
A golden tip from Selene: Working hard is important, but don’t forget to enjoy yourself at the university!
