The Swedish Research Council has awarded project grants to four researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering through its 2025 call within Natural Sciences and Engineering. The grants will be distributed over the next four years. Below, the recipients share more about their projects and what the support means for their research.
Awarded grants
Erik Agrell, Full Professor in Communication Systems
Project: Complexity-Constrained Lattices for Communications and Signal Processing
“A lattice is a very regular and beautiful geometric structure, with numerous applications in communications, signal processing, data compression, and even astrophysics. Some lattices perform better than others, but the theoretically best lattices tend to be practically useless because of their high complexity. The target of this project is to design practically useful lattices with pretty good, but not optimal, performance.
I studied lattices in my PhD 30 years ago and as sidetracks in more applied research projects, but this is my first research grant dedicated entirely to their design and usage.”
Christian Häger, doctor Communication Systems
Project: Fiber Networks as Unintended Microphone Arrays: Attack Surface, Vulnerability, and Defenses
“The project aims to investigate to what extent ordinary fiber-optic communication networks could unintentionally act as microphones, capturing ambient sound or possibly even human conversations through tiny vibrations in the fibers. While it is already known that optical fibers are sensitive to acoustic signals, our research focuses on a passive sensing approach. This basically means that we want to analyze the communication signals that are already traveling through the network, rather than injecting new ones. This makes the problem both technically challenging and relevant from a cybersecurity perspective. Our goal is to understand how much information could be extracted from such acoustic leakage and to develop countermeasures that protect network integrity without affecting its performance.
The project means a lot to me because it is a really a collaborative effort between researchers from the E2 and MC2 departments at Chalmers. Alongside myself, the team includes co-PIs Magnus Karlsson, Marija Furdek, and Mats Viberg, who bring complementary expertise in photonics, optical fiber security, and signal processing. The grant will provide us with an opportunity to combine our different backgrounds to explore what we believe is a timely research project.”
Ida Häggström, Associate Professor, Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering
Project: Leveraging joint vision–language models to improve diagnostic accuracy and disease localization in medical imaging
“The project explores how pairing medical scans with the radiologists’ written reports during training can make AI better at detecting disease, localizing abnormal regions, and estimating diagnostic confidence, even when only the images are available later. By integrating visual and textual information, the models are expected to achieve higher diagnostic accuracy and more human-like reasoning.
I’m very happy about this grant. This funding allows us to take a major step toward AI that not only matches human expertise but also explains its reasoning in a way clinicians can better trust. Ultimately, our goal is to improve diagnostic accuracy and reduce unnecessary tests - benefiting both patients and our healthcare system.
I will recruit a PhD student to carry out the work, in collaboration with national and international partners. The project contributes to more accurate, explainable, and efficient medical image analysis - ultimately supporting better patient care.”
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Associate Professor, Systems and Control
Project: MILE-Cobots: Multidimensional Interpretable Learning for Experience-Driven Collaborative Robots
“MILE-Cobots aims to develop an interpretable learning framework that empowers collaborative robots to reason, adapt, and explain their actions within human-robot teams in dynamic environments. This project will investigate fundamental limitations that currently prevent Cobots from achieving true autonomy in shared, unstructured settings.
I am truly honored to receive this prestigious grant, which gives me the opportunity to pursue my passion for developing new ways to help robots learn, adapt, and work alongside people in ways that everyone can understand.”