Selected talks from the innovation conference
We have uploaded a selection of the 35+ talks from Aarhus University Digital Innovation Festival. They are available below.
We love to collaborate so please reach out to some of the people below if you want to engage further.
Kresten Krab Thorup : Humio - Real time Log Analytics at Scale
In today’s complex deployment environment, our systems are increasingly more difficult to understand. When “the system” is a composite distributed system using cloud technologies and microservices, things happen everywhere and it’s difficult to get a feel for the system as a whole.
Humio provides the capability to understand, monitor, and debug such complex systems using log analytics in real-time and at massive scale. Our solution is already in use for managing large scale installations (+10TB/day data volumes, PB-scale data storage) for such diverse usages as application monitoring and network security.
This presentation outlines the story of Humio, how it came to be, what we provide, and where we’re going.
Kresten provides technical leadership and vision at Humio, a local Aarhus start-up with nation and global customers and investors. In his previous role as CTO of Trifork, Kresten was responsible for technical strategy and has provided consulting advice to teams on a variety of technologies. Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. In his early days, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten has a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Aarhus.
Henrik Wann Jensen: Virtual Photography Using Computer Graphics (Research+Industry)
Henrik Wann Jensen is an international leading researcher within Computer Graphics. He is, among other things, known for global illumination, photon mapping, and subsurface scattering, methods, which are used for rendering photo-realistic scenes in movies and pictures. To honour this work, he received an Academy Award (Technical Achievement Award) from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the methods to render the skin of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies.
Henrik Wann Jensen has a PhD in Computer Science from DTU in 1996. He has been a Postdoc at MIT, a Research Associate at Stanford University, and has been Assistant, Associate and Full Professor (2002-2018) at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Professor Emeritus. He has also been a visiting Otto Mønsted Professor at DTU. He has been consultant for some of the most famous digital film producers Pixar (Steve Jobs), Weta (Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings and James Cameron, Avatar). He now works as full-time Chief Scientist for Luxion, which develops the KeyShot tool, that is widely used for product visualization in areas such as design, advertisement, and architecture.
Tiare Feuchtner: The Role of Our Bodies During Interaction in the Virtual Invironment (Research)
State of the art interactions in virtual environments frequently involve the user of VR controllers. But what might happen, if users could interact with the virtual world directly through their (virtual) bodies instead? Research shows that what you perceive as your own body can change based on what you see, feel, and believe. For example, under certain circumstances you might begin to feel that a virtual body, or part thereof, replaces your own physical body. This is called a body ownership illusion. In my research I explore how such body ownership illusions might be leveraged to overcome the limitations of our physical bodies and to create more efficient and engaging interactions.
For instance, you could feel body ownership of an unnaturally long virtual arm that allows you to interact with distant objects. Or you could “own” a virtual hand that appears to be reaching towards an overhead target, while your physical hand rests much more comfortably at waist-level. This enables new ways of interacting with virtual or augmented reality.
Consequently, while most approaches to interaction design attempt to modify the virtual world or tools with which we interact, I instead propose to modify the body we interact through – or at least our mental image thereof.
Christina Boutrup: The Great Tech Revolution (Keynote)
Christina Boutrup is one of Denmark’s leading China connoisseurs and is affiliated as a China analyst for the TV channel TV2. She is an educated business journalist, and since 2004 she has followed the development of China closely, working as an Asia correspondent and hosting radio and television programs, among other things. She has written several critically acclaimed books, and she is widely used as lecturer, facilitator and moderator at Danish and international conferences and workshops. She is also serves on the advisory board for the think tank Think China at the University of Copenhagen.
Peter Dalsgaard: Creativity and Computers (Research)
Creativity is consistently listed as one of the most sought-after skills, and much work in the creative sector today revolves around digital systems. Yet our knowledge of how digital tools influence creativity, for better or worse, is limited. In this talk, I’ll discuss the role and nature of digital tools in creative processes and examine how we might develop systems that go beyond automation of routine work and help us think and create in new ways.
Andreas Lykke Olesen: Physical Exception Handling (Industry)
Merging physical and digital spaces requires a set of tools that not only catches digital exceptions but also physical ones. Presence and prototyping are among the best methods for varifying designs and interactions before final implementation. My talk will give examples of the importance of “being around” when digital meets physical in urban installations.
Bas Spitters: Smart Contracts and Formal Verification for the Blockchain (Research)
In the Concordium Blockchain Research Center we investigate the design of smart contract languages, the specification of smart contracts and their formal verification. I will present this work in the context of our bigger effort to provide basic research for the blockchain.
Diego F Aranha: Can Blockchains Make Voting More Secure (Research)
The talk presents a nuanced view about if and how blockchains can improve official elections in terms of security and transparency. While there is a huge amount of hype and excitement around this potential application of blockchains, we briefly examine the failures of current electronic voting systems and how they relate to blockchain technology, attempting to detect what parts of a typical electoral process can likely benefit from the security properties provided by blockchains.
Diego F. Aranha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at Aarhus University. He was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Brasília (3 years) and the University of Campinas (4 years). He holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Campinas and has worked as a visiting PhD student for 1 year at the University of Waterloo. His professional experience is in Cryptography and Computer Security, with a special interest in the efficient implementation of cryptographic algorithms and security analysis of real-world systems. He coordinated two teams of independent researchers capable of detecting and exploring vulnerabilities in the software of the Brazilian voting machine during controlled tests organized by the national electoral authority. He received the Google Latin America Research Award for research on privacy twice, and the MIT TechReview’s Innovators Under 35 Brazil Award for his work in electronic voting.
Kasper Verdich Lund: Robust, Software Centric IoT (Industry)
Small IoT devices are inherently brittle to program due to lack of memory protection, limited resources, and only a thin layer of operating system support. Developers link all the firmware together and deploy it as a whole, thus making every single change a full, reboot-required system update that potentially wrecks havoc with the overall system integrity. Isn’t it time that we make the platforms more modern and robust – and start deploying and updating software components and apps independently?
Samuel Thrysøe: Medical 3D Printing Innovating Patient Care through Customized Implants (Research)
Using a combination of 3D imaging and printing, the medical field has progressed to allow previously impossible procedures offering patients faster and improved healthcare where implants are no longer “one size fits all” but rather custom-fitted to the individual patients. Patients destined for early death, severe disability, and congenital heart problems can now be treated using 3D printed metal implants and biodegradable polymers. In this talk Samuel Thrysøe will present many examples of innovative medical treatments made possible by 3D printing technology.
Want to know more? Want to collaborate?
We love to collaborate and truly believe it is the only way to innovate.
Check out some of the departments at Aarhus University that do state-of-the-art digital research
- Department of Computer Science
- Department of Engineering
- School of Engineering
- Department of Digital Design and Information Studies