Articles – Magazine of the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS

Portrait: Ania Kosmalska
"I have a box full of cables and a whole bunch of ideas, but no time."

There’s nothing Ania Kosmalska likes more than taking a computer program and a few electronic gadgets and experimenting in her daily life. But these days, she devotes a large part of her free time to her young daughter. Part two of our employee profile series.

Cognitive systems

Employee portraits

December 16, 2020

Interview with Simon Burton
“I’ve always had a great affinity for research.”

Science needs to prove that systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) are safe enough. That is what Prof. Simon Burton, who recently became Division Director for Safety at Fraunhofer IKS, is calling for. In this interview he explains the institute’s approaches to ensuring safety.

Artificial intelligence

Interviews

December 8, 2020

Fighting climate change with artificial intelligence

When it comes to environmental protection and climate action, most people think of renewable energies, electric cars and sustainable consumer goods. Very few would associate it with artificial intelligence (AI), but in fact AI has a crucial part to play in the fight against pollution and climate change.

Artificial intelligence

November 13, 2020

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

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