Alf Isaksson ABB Corporate Research Västerås, Sweden, alf.isaksson@se.abb.com
The ABB Research Award in Honor of Hubertus von Grünberg is bestowed only every third year and is intended to distinguish external researchers. The award is named after Hubertus von Grünberg →01, a former Chairman of the Board of Directors of ABB. The winner is selected from many submissions by a jury composed of prominent academics, Dr. Bernhard Eschermann, Chief Technology Officer of ABB Process Automation and Dr. Hubertus von Grünberg.
The award winner receives a $300,000 grant to support their research over a three-year period. This sum represents one of the world’s highest-endowed research prizes to be offered by a company. The award is bestowed by the ABB CEO at a special ceremony →02.
The award is intended to encourage world-class research in ABB’s main fields of operation: electrification and automation. The award recognizes outstanding postdoctoral research – in particular, work that makes creative use of software, electronics or new materials to pave the way for groundbreaking industrial solutions →03.
The 2022 winner
Even as a schoolboy in India, Utsav Banerjee was fascinated by the latest developments in electronics. Now, after having received an MSc and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he is pushing the boundaries of technology. As an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bengaluru, Dr. Banerjee’s work addresses security and privacy issues in the IoT. The aim is to bridge the gap between complex theoretical concepts and practical implementation to enable efficient hardware solutions for secure edge computing. This area of research involves complex mathematics and sophisticated electronic circuit design, especially relating to silicon chip architecture. The field is becoming increasingly important as more and more components connect to the internet and exchange data across companies’ sites.
Faster and better encryption using less power
Complex algorithms are used to encrypt data passing between connected devices in the process and automation sectors. However, this encryption requires hefty computing muscle. Dr. Banerjee’s research aims to improve and speed up the encryption and authentication of data while reducing the computational power needed for these tasks.
An enabler for other breakthroughs Dr. Banerjee’s research will lead to new implementation-level advances in secure computation. Results from this research are expected to inspire breakthroughs in the field of privacy-preserving computation, taking one further step toward the goal of strong, affordable and high-efficiency data security.
“Our hope is that we will be able to embed high-performance, low-power hardware into tiny devices and that all the data collected by these devices will be encrypted and will remain so even during subsequent computation in the cloud,” explains Dr. Banerjee. “This award will help me research hardware security and how to enable the hardware systems that will perform computations on encrypted data. These investigations will involve software and hardware components and custom chip design.”
Dr. Banerjee chose to conduct his research at the Indian Institute of Science because it is the leading institute in the country. He adds, “Being in India, I still stay close to my roots and I have an opportunity to contribute back to my society through research and teaching.”
ABB Review will publish a full-length article on Dr. Bannerjee’s work in a later edition.
References
[1] R. Schoenrock, "Prestigious award for network researcher", ABB Review 2/2020, pp28-29.
Photo fig. 02: ©Selina Meier/ABB
