Tutorial Seminars

Tutorial seminars are organized by AsCII (the ICTEAM researchers' association) and aim at gathering top quality presentations targeted to a public at large to present researchs from the ICTEAM institute. They are mainly dedicated to the researchers from the institute and to master students who are interested by what is going on in our institute. The seminars are of course opened to anyone who is interested.

Seminars take place from 1 to 2pm in the A002 auditorium (Euler building) and will be given in English.

June 20, 2012

• Electricity-producing bacteria? The emergence of bioelectrochemical systems, Samuel Sonck (ELEN)
  Bioelectrochemical systems are devices converting chemical energy from organic matter to electrical energy and vice-versa. Their working principle is basically the same as a classical hydrogen fuel cell, except that they use bacteria as catalysts instead of (expensive)chemical species, such as platinum.
  The diversity of available bacteria species enables bioelectrochemical systems to use a whole bunch of different types of organic matter as fuel, increasing their robustness.
  Besides crude electricity production, bioelectrochemical systems scan be used on one hand as macro-device, treating wastewater or, used in a reversed way, producing hydrogen, on the other hand as a micro-device, supplying power to sensors and electronic circuits, or being a sensor themselves.
   
• Modeling of the aromatic profile of wine: main-kinetics description, Robert David (INMA)
  The aromatic profile of young wines is mainly determined during the grape-must fermentation and is characterized by several compounds called flavour markers. These particular compounds are minority by-products produced from "leaks of metabolism" of the used yeast. The final objective of this work is to gain more insight about the synthesis of the aromatic profile in order to optimize it. For this purpose, a first necessary step is the development of a model representing the main physiological phenomena observed during the batch fermentation in the wine-making process in order to later extend it with flavour-markers equations. The main-kinetics model is based on a set of biological reactions in which nitrogen compounds such as hexose transporters play a central role, in line with experimental evidence deduced from extensive experimental studies.

 

May 23, 2012

• µ-Lightning for environmental fingerprinting and gas detection through a MEMS ionization device, Thomas Walewyns (ELEN)
  Electrostatic discharges are a main cause of failure in microsystems with irreversible damage on nano-/micro-scale structures. However, the ionization current flowing during this phenomenon is directly related to the nature and concentration of the gaseous species present in the environment, resulting in a unique fingerprint. Targeting integrated devices, low ionization voltages are obtained by reducing the device size and incorporating nanostructures, such as nanowires or nanotubes, to locally enhance the electric field like lightning rods. This talk is focusing on the development of a 3D MEMS ionization device combining capacitive actuation with field ionization in a novel architecture. Such structures open the way to universal gas sensors for environmental monitoring with ultra-low power consumption, performing high sensitivity, selectivity and dynamics.
   
• NANOcore: A Cross-Disciplinary Atomistic Quantum Simulation Platform as a Conceptual Tool for NanoElectronic Device Engineering, Aryan Afzalian (ELEN)
  As electronic devices are scaled down in the nanoscale regime, properties that were used to be considered as material properties at larger scale, e.g. electronic band structure, are now becoming device properties that really depend on the size and shape of the structure. This is due to quantum effects and potentially opens a full new range of prospects and applications. Also scaling alone is not sufficient to achieve performance improvement and new advanced materials and device concepts are actively explored. In this context of rapid changes, simulations are more than ever needed to asses and understand these new routes and new physical effects. Based on macroscopic descriptions, traditional device simulation approaches lack the physics and versatility to address such challenge, however, and device-level models and simulation tools that are microscopic and quantum in essence, i.e. that can link the atomic structure and properties to the devices ones, are highly desirable.
  In this tutorial, we give a brief overview of the emerging microscopic quantum transport formalism for device simulation, the non-equilibrium Green function method (NEGF). The main concepts and potential of the method are introduced in an intuitive manner and illustrated by concrete examples on advanced devices such as quantum nanowires and graphene nano-ribbons for electronic and bio-electronic applications.

 

April 25, 2012

• The complex networks to understand the world around us, Maguy Tréfois (INMA)
  Networks are mathematical structures allowing to model systems with interacting agents. There exist many classes of networks : the technological, biological or social networks are some important examples. Because the structure of the networks allows to understand how the underlying system works, there is an important interest in research towards complex networks. In this talk, the importance of networks will be illustrated through some concrete examples. Moreover, as communities in networks provide information about their structure, the community detection problem will be introduced and some applications will be provided.
   
• Formal methods to help avoiding bad human-machine interactions, Sébastien Combéfis (INGI)
  Automated systems are increasingly complex, making it hard to design interfaces for human operators. Human-machine interaction (HMI) errors like automation surprises are more likely to appear and lead to system failures or accidents. This talk presents some well-known accidents that occur and focuses on the specific aspects of the bad interaction in general. Finally, the more specific technique that we are using is briefly presented.

  

March 21, 2012

• Big Brother knows what you did last summer, Iwen Coisel (ELEN)
  Nowadays, more and more applications use contacless devices. While this technology allows for example to speed up a stocktaking or to punch a ticket in a wallet, it also permit nasty people to discretely interact with these devices. Obviously, private data that may be contained in these devices must be protected while maintaining the validity of the scheme. Nevertheless, anonymity is not enough to consider that an application is privacy-preserving. Indeed, even if it is impossible to decide what items are carried by someone, being able to follow the holder's path can be considered as a threat. The aim of this talk is to provide an intuition about security model and to detail how challenging it is to design private solutions for lightweight devices.
   
• The torque in the kingdom of motor control, Thibault Giard (INMA)
  Manipulating a cup by the handle requires compensating for the torque induced by the moment of the mass of the cup relative to the location of the handle. In the present study, we investigated the control strategy of subjects asked to perform grip-lift movements with an object with center of mass located away from the grip axis. Participants were asked to lift the manipulandum with a two-fingers precision grip and stabilize it in front of a visual target. Subjects showed a gradual and slow adaptation of the grip force scaling across trials and a compensation for the dynamic torque based on an anticipatory dynamic counter-torque produced by the arm and wrist motor commands.

    
 

February 15, 2012

• Green Systems-on-chip for a sustainable Web3.0 world, David Bol (ELEN)
  The vision of a Web3.0 world, also called the Internet-of-Things, targets the development of ambient intelligence with wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) attached to objects, allowing them to interact with the cloud. Web3.0 will enable exciting new applications in fields such as energy savings, habitat, transportation, healthcare, entertainment and security. However, this vision calls for the deployment of up to a trillion connected WSNs with millions of terabytes of annual data traffic, which may trigger critical sustainability concerns. In this seminar, we will see how green systems-on-chip (SoCs) can help limiting these concerns and show fresh Soc examples designed at UCL.
  
  
• An Exceptional Day, Bernard Lambeau (INGI)
  Requirements engineering aims at providing methods, tools and techniques to help reasoning about what a software system should do. An aspect often neglected during requirements gathering, specification and software development is the expected behavior of a software in presence of failures. The talk provides an introduction to this important topic.