Articles – Magazine of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS

Flexilience: balancing key requirements in autonomous systems

Reconciling safety, performance and reliability in cloud-based cognitive systems is no easy task. Especially in safety-critical autonomous systems such as driverless cars, expectations rightly assume that all three requirements are implemented at the highest level. However, this comes up against limited resources. The Fraunhofer IKS has developed an approach for optimising safety, performance and reliability depending on the current situation and concrete applications: flexilience.

Cognitive systems

Institute buildup/expansion

October 16, 2020

Uncertainty Estimation in Object Detection – a mission-critical task

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have proven their potential. This applies above all to their use in the laboratory. Their performance in real-world applications leaves a lot to be desired. One major problem is the estimation of uncertainty. A closer look at methods that meet this challenge.

Artificial intelligence

Institute buildup/expansion

October 8, 2020

resilientsoa
A software toolkit for flexible and robust architectures

Flexible service-oriented architectures (SOAs) in safety-critical applications have been virtually out of the question until now. This is because services need to be reliably available and safety requirements need to be met at all times. Fraunhofer IKS has developed resilientsoa, a software framework that meets these needs by ensuring that service orchestration is as safe as necessary while performing as well as possible.

Cognitive systems

Institute buildup/expansion

October 2, 2020

Software on four wheels, or traditional cars plus apps:
A paradigm shift on the automotive market?

On the automotive market, traditional manufacturers are in a head-to-head race with new players from the software world. In the end, the winner will be decided not only on the basis of technological innovation, but also by how secure the technologies are.

Autonomous driving

September 3, 2020

Designing and evaluating dependable cloud-based systems

Addressing the wide range of challenges in dependable cloud-based cyber-physical systems of systems (CPSoS) requires new approaches that are automated and efficient enough to shift some of the system’s elements to runtime. To design and evaluate the system architecture, Fraunhofer IKS has developed an iterative and automated process.

Cognitive systems

Institute buildup/expansion

August 27, 2020

Flexible and dynamic systems
Dynamic safety assurance in end-to-end architectures

When a system malfunctions or a required service is not provisioned in a timely manner, this can lead to human injuries or fatalities. These situations are considered safety-critical, e.g. in automated driving and human robot interaction. For this reason, the systems that are involved must exhibit a high degree of dependability. To determine a system’s dependability, scientists at Fraunhofer IKS are developing an adaptive, dynamic and flexible safety analysis process that overcomes the limitations of current methods.

Institute buildup/expansion

August 20, 2020

Cloud-based systems face safety and efficiency challenges – ways out of a catch 22 situation

The future will rely on widespread, massively-connected, highly-intelligent systems. To implement this vision, we need dependable cloud-based cyber-physical systems. Research in this direction encounters as many opportunities as challenges. Such systems exist in changing environments and interact with other systems and humans, which requires intelligence, autonomy, safety and adaptability – in fact, conflicting goals. An example of this is autonomous driving.

Cognitive systems

Institute buildup/expansion

July 16, 2020

Artificial Intelligence
Why Safety Matters

Machine learning means a disruptive challenge for safety assurance. Without an acceptable safety assurance concept, many great ideas will not find their way to the market. It’s therefore no surprise that AI safety has gained much more attention over the past few months. A brief series of articles will take a closer look at the importance of safety for AI. The first article focuses on the basic understanding of what safety actually means. It highlights why it is so important to understand that safe AI has less to do with AI itself and much more to do with safety engineering.

Artificial intelligence

June 25, 2020

Artificial intelligence
Playing it safe with machine learning

Machine learning, and especially deep learning, can be used to enable many highly complex applications, such as autonomous driving. However, there are new challenges that need to be overcome to secure such systems. An overview.

Artificial intelligence

June 18, 2020

Searching for the unknown
Uncovering difficult situations for autonomous driving systems

Today, autonomous vehicles function reasonably well in test situations since the conditions are severely restricted and thus easy to manage. A key issue however is how to design autonomous vehicles so that they operate dependably even in complex and previously unknown situations. A solution from Fraunhofer IKS is helping to uncover and predict such difficult situations.

Autonomous driving

Institute buildup/expansion

April 30, 2020

All articles