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Augmented reality is a set of technologies that will fundamentally change the way we interact with our environment. It represents a merging of the physical and the digital worlds into a rich, context aware and accessible user interface delivered through a socially acceptable form factor such as eyeglasses. One of the biggest challenges in realizing a comprehensive AR experience are the performance and form factor requiring new custom silicon. Innovations are mandatory to manage power consumption constraints and ensure both adequate battery life and a physically comfortable thermal envelope. This presentation reviews Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications and Silicon challenges.

The concept of Digital Twins (DTs) has been discussed intensively for the past couple of years. Today we have instances of digital twins that range from static descriptions of manufacturing data and material properties to live interfaces to operational data of cyber physical systems and the functions and services they provide.

Currently, there are no standardized interfaces to aggregate atomic DTs (e.g., the twin of the lowest-level function of a machine) to higher-level DTs providing more complex services in the virtual world. Additionally, there is no existing infrastructure to reliably link the DTs in the virtual world to the integrated CPSs in the real world (like a car consisting of many ECUs with even more functions).

This keynote will address how the Metaverse can become the virtual world where DTs of humans and machines live and how to reliably connect DTs to the physical world. Insights in current activities of Bosch Research and its academic partners to move towards this vision will be provided.

The emergence of “Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI)” in the late 1970’s created a groundswell of feverish innovation. Inspired by the vision laid out in Mead and Conway’s “Introduction to VLSI Design”, numerous researchers embarked on venues to unleash the capabilities offered by integrated circuit technology. The introduction of design rules, separating manufacturing from design, combined with an intermediate abstraction language (CIF) and a silicon brokerage service (MOSIS) gave access to silicon for a large population of eager designers. The magic however expanded way beyond these circuit enthusiasts and attracted a whole generation of software experts to help automate the design process, given rise to concepts such as layout generation, logic synthesis, and silicon compilation. It is hard to overestimate the impact that this revolution has had on information technology and society at large.

About fifty years later, Integrated Circuits are everywhere. Yet, the process of creating these amazing devices feels somewhat tired. CMOS scaling, the engine behind the evolution in complexity over all these decades, is slowing down and will most likely peter out in about a decade. So has innovation in design tools and methodologies. As a consequence, the lure of IC design and design tool development has faded, causing a talent shortage worldwide. Yet, at the same time, this moment of transition offers a world of opportunity and excitement. Novel technologies and devices, integrated in three-dimensional artifacts are emerging and are opening the door for truly transformational applications such as brain-machine interfaces and swarms of nanobots. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, optical and quantum computing present novel models of computation surpassing the instruction-set processor paradigm. With this comes a need again to re-invent the design process, explicitly exploiting the capabilities offered by this next generation of computing systems. In summary, it is time to put the magic in design again.

Our research work focuses on modeling Socially Interactive Agents, i.e. agents capable of interacting socially with human partners, of communicating verbally and non-verbally, of showing emotions. but also of adapting their behaviors to favor the engagement of their partners during the interaction. As partner of an interaction, SIA should be able to adapt its multimodal behaviors and conversational strategies to optimize the engagement of its human interlocutors. We have developed models to equip these agents with these communicative and social abilities. In this talk, I will present the works we have been conducted.

The complexity, cycle time and cost of new precision therapy workflow are a major challenge to overcome in order to achieve clinical implementation of this revolutionary type of treatments. For example, car T cells use the patient’s own immune (T-)cell adapted in a way to better fight cancer.  Chip technology can help to make these therapies more efficient, precise, and cost-effective. Over the last few decades, the semiconductor industry has grown exponentially, poised to increase value to the end-user while driving down costs by scaling. The result is the world’s highest standard in precision and high-volume production of nanoelectronics chip-based sensor solutions.  Imec has used its semiconductor process expertise and infrastructure to make significant innovations in single-use silicon biochip and microfluidic technology, creating toolboxes of on-chip functions spanning DNA sequencing, cell sorting, single cell electroporation, integrated biosensor arrays.   The solutions have until now mostly served the diagnostic market. Chip based microfluidics is a toolbox that brings its own design challenges, especially in relation to not having to reinvent the wheel every time. Hence, we try to make maximal reuse of generic fluidic building blocks developed for the diagnostic market, and we will explain how these building blocks are equally adapted for addressing the challenges in immune therapy. These existing demonstrations on chip could enable to provide smarter solutions for discrete unit operations and quality monitoring to even complete workflow integration.  Solving these challenges would enable more patients to access and benefit from the next most anticipated class of life changing therapies.