The AI agenda – Interview Shiva Sander-Tavallaey
"A distinctive feature of "AI", as a research subject, is access to data and thus the need for close collaboration across the entire ecosystem including industry and academia. This in turn calls for new and novel “rules of play” for all partners."
Shiva Sander-Tavallaey, ABB
Representative Workgroup Education
In January 2001 Shiva joined ABB Corporate Research in Västerås, Sweden. March 2018, she is appointed as AI-Lead in Sweden coordinating the AI-related activities in ABB Sweden. She was appointed in May 2018 as Senior Principal Scientist in Applied Analytics. Read more about Shiva's background after the interview.
How does ABB work with AI today, and how can AI contribute to creating added value for the customer?
We see trend of shifting from automated systems to autonomous systems. This will unlock greater value by improving productivity. A key enabler of this shift is AI. AI will allow:
- Robots to be more collaborative, easier to use and move beyond dirty, dull and dangerous tasks.
- Industrial systems will increasingly be able to handle situations they were not specifically programmed for.
- Our electrical systems will be able to balance the more complex production side and demand side dynamics caused by intermittent renewables, distributed generation, storage systems and new loads such as electric cars.
The shift to autonomous systems will happen over a period of time. As new AI techniques develop, more and more elements will benefit by the progress. Already today we see great value in service and maintenance.
More information
Robotics and medical applications (YouTube)
Remote and collaboration centers providing advanced services
ABB Ability™ Energy Management for sites - OPTIMAX® (YouTube)
Smart Sensor (YouTube)
What do you think is most important in the AI collaboration between academia and business?
Combining practical relevance and scientific rigour comes almost always with challenges: ”From an academic perspective, it can be more interesting when things are not working than when they are. In industry, we don’t find that interesting, only frustrating.” [A. Sannö etal. Increasing the Impact of Industry–Academia Collaboration through Co-Production, Technology Innovation Management Review- April 2019 (Volume 9, Issue 4)]
Historically, in most cases the fundamental research of interest to industry could be sufficiently separated from day-to-day business. But a distinctive feature of "AI", as a research subject, is access to data and thus the need for close collaboration across the entire ecosystem including industry and academia. This in turn calls for new and novel “rules of play” for all partners.
In my opinion the understanding of the consequences of this required “change”, is the biggest challenge that must be acknowledged and solved through a joint effort of the entire ecosystem, including government, legislation and regulations.
In what way do you think AI can have a positive impact on the climate?
It is all about meeting the challenges of climate change, SDG linked to sustainable cities and clean energy, while the expansion of renewable and decentralized production places new demands. The inherent uncertainty in the renewable energy sources on one hand and the increased and partly unpredictable energy consumption on the other hand, supplemented by a decentralized production and distribution of energy, requires an overall dynamic as well as static optimization. Such a complex optimization problem can be solved almost exclusively using advanced data-driven algorithms (read AI / ML) based on a large amount of real-time data. In other words, AI will be one of the main components to solve these challenges.
Background Shiva Sander-Tavallaey
Shiva Sander Tavallaey received a MSc in Mechanical Engineering 1988 from Chalmers University of Technology (CTH) and a PhD in Sound and Vibration/ Technical Acoustics in 2000 from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. After graduating as MSc, she started at Volvo Car AB as Senior designer, where she among the others initiated an R&D project in collaboration with Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) which in turn lead to her increased interest in the field of wave propagation in different media as well as signal processing.
In January 2001 she joined ABB Corporate Research in Västerås, Sweden. After a specialist career within condition monitoring and diagnostics, culminating in an appointment to Principal Scientist in 2009, she started in a management position leading a team of 15-20 specialists in modeling and control of industrial automation applications. During this period, she continued working with different applications and projects applying state of the art approaches such as AI/ ML for anomaly detection, predictive and prescriptive maintenance.
In 2015, she was appointed as Adjunct professor at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in the department of Vehicle Engineering, at Marcus Wallenberg Laboratory of sound and vibration.
In February 2018 she stepped off the management team to follow the specialist career. She was appointed in May 2018 as Senior Principal Scientist in Applied Analytics. She is since March 2018 appointed as AI-Lead in Sweden coordinating the AI-related activities in ABB Sweden