data – Politecnico di Milano – Progress in Research

ACTIVE: the digital app for personalised coaching

Posted on 08/02/202409/02/2024 by admin

Yesterday in the morning, at the Lecco Campus, the ACTIVE App was presented. It is a personalised coaching application created as part of ActivE³ – Everyone, Everywhere, Everyday, a Major Emblematic Project funded by Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia that aims at promoting an active lifestyle through the use of technology. The app is the result of the work of the researchers of Sensibilab – Laboratory for Sensors and Biomedical Systems at the Lecco Campus, ASST Lecco, ATS Brianza and Villa Beretta – Presidio di Riabilitazione dell’Ospedale Valduce.

The app has a dual function: for the user, it is a digital personalised training guide that includes health tips; for researchers and health professionals, it is a useful data platform to check the effectiveness of this tool in improving/maintaining well-being and for designing new prevention initiatives aimed at the community.

We are approaching the new era of digital therapies. Today, as part of the Active3 project, we start experimenting a prevention service based on an App aimed to promote and monitor active and nutritionally balanced lifestyles for the over-60 population.

A clinical trial phase will now start, involving 200 healthy individuals in the 60-80 age group for the next 18 months. The trial will be validated by a screening of the participants’ health status and will include cognitive questionnaires on health status and nutrition and motor, psychometric and neuro-psychological tests as well as blood samples, which will be used to assess the effects of using the app on the participants’ overall health. The ACTIVE app will act as a motivational tool to encourage more static participants to get active and to stimulate those already active to maintain a healthy lifestyle by providing feedback on their activity and personalised hints.

Thanks to Fondazione Cariplo, Regione Lombardia and the network of technological and clinical partners, we are developing an integrated system in the local area that we hope will be used and disseminated after the end of the project in favour of a real 5P medicine (Preventive, Predictive, Participative, Personalised and Psychosocial) of the future.
Prof. Giuseppe Andreoni, scientific coordinator of the Sensibilab laboratory,

Optical wireless may no longer have any obstacles

Posted on 19/12/202316/01/2024 by admin

Optical wireless may no longer have any obstacles. A study by Politecnico di Milano, conductedtogether with Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, the University of Glasgow and Stanford University, and published in the prestigious journal Nature Photonics, has made it possible to create photonic chips that mathematically calculate the optimal shape of light to best pass through any environment, even one that is unknown or changing over time.

The problem is well known: light is sensitive to any form of obstacle, even very small ones. Think, for example, of how we see objects when looking through a frosted window or simply when our glasses get foggy. The effect is quite similar on a beam of light carrying data streams in optical wireless systems: the information, while still present, is completely distorted and extremely difficult to retrieve.

The devices developed in this research are small silicon chips that serve as smart transceivers: working in pairs, they can automatically and autonomously ‘calculate’ what shape a beam of light needs to be in order to pass through a generic environment with maximum efficiency. Not only that: at the same time they can also generate many overlapping beams, each with its own shape, and direct them without them interfering with each other. This makes it possible to significantly increase transmission capacity, just as required by next-generation wireless systems.

Our chips are mathematical processors that make calculations on light very quickly and efficiently, almost with no energy consumption. The optical beams are generated through simple algebraic operations, essentially sums and multiplications, performed directly on the light signals and transmitted by micro-antennas directly integrated on the chips. This technology offers many advantages: extremely easy processing, high energy efficiency and an enormous bandwidth exceeding 5000 GHz
Francesco Morichetti, Head of the Photonic Devices Lab

‘Today, all information is digital, but in fact, images, sounds and all data are inherently analogue. Digitisation does allow for very complex processing, but as the volume of data increases, these operations become increasingly less sustainable in terms of energy and computation. Today, there is great interest in returning to analogue technologies, through dedicated circuits (analogue co-processors) that will serve as enablers for the 5G and 6G wireless interconnection systems of the future. Our chips work just like that’, stresses Andrea Melloni, Director of Polifab, Politecnico di Milano’s micro and nanotechnology centre.

The activity is co-funded under the NRRP by the RESTART research and development programme ‘RESearch and innovation on future Telecommunications systems and networks, to make Italy more smart’, in which Prof. Andrea Melloni of Politecnico di Milano and Prof. Piero Castoldi of the TeCIP Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa are coordinating the HePIC and Rigoletto projects, which aim to build prototypes in integrated photonics and future optical communications networks enabling the 6G infrastructure.

SeyedinNavadeh, S., Milanizadeh, M., Zanetto, F. et al.
Determining the optimal communication channels of arbitrary optical systems using integrated photonic processors.
Nat. Photon. (2023).

Read the study online

ERC Advanced Grant to Daniele Ielmini with Animate

Posted on 28/04/202229/04/2022 by admin

Daniele Ielmini, professor at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, will conduct ANIMATE (ANalogue In-Memory computing with Advanced device Technology), a project that aims to develop a new computational concept to reduce energy consumption in machine learning.

We generate, process and use a huge amount of data every day. Searching for a keyword on the internet, choosing a film for the weekend or booking our next holiday are just some of the actions that rely on data-intensive algorithms.

The energy cost of this type of calculation is extremely high: it has been estimated that training a conventional neural network for artificial intelligence (AI) produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 5 cars in their life cycle. Data centres, which currently meet most of the world’s AI needs, now consume about 1% of global energy demand, with growth expected to reach 7% by 2030. To correct this worrying trend, new energy-efficient hardware solutions are needed. Professor Ielmini’s preliminary ANIMATE research has shown that computational energy requirements can be reduced by closed-loop in-memory computing (CL-IMC), which can solve linear algebra problems in a single computational step.

In CL-IMC, the time to solve a given problem does not increase in proportion to the size of the problem, unlike other computing concepts, such as digital and quantum computers. Thanks to the reduction in calculation time, CL-IMC requires 5,000 times less energy than digital computers with the same accuracy in terms of number of bits.

Ielmini’s project will develop the device and circuit technology, system architectures and set of applications to fully validate the CL-IMC concept. System-level architecture and exploring its applications will further prove the scalability and feasibility of the concept, to prove that CL-IMC is a major contender among energy-efficient computing technologies.

Our university once again proves to be at the forefront, having outperformed its scholarly competitors in a very competitive selection process, with only 14.6% of the 1735 projects submitted receiving funding. With this project, the Politecnico di Milano has been awarded a total of 86 European Individual Grants (including ERC and Marie Curie).