Thesis offers

This project offers the candidate a unique opportunity to apply artificial intelligence techniques to real-world challenges in lung cancer research and treatment. As part of this thesis, the candidate will work with datasets, including patient records, genetic data, molecular alterations, treatment outcomes, and exposome data. These datasets will serve as the foundation for developing AI models that address critical challenges in lung cancer treatment, such as predicting patient outcomes and identifying optimal treatment strategies.

The candidate will focus on the following core tasks:

Data Exploration and Preprocessing: The candidate will gain experience in handling complex medical datasets by cleaning, preparing, and structuring the data to ensure it is suitable for advanced AI analysis.

Building AI Models: Using machine learning and deep learning techniques, the candidate will develop models aimed at predicting lung cancer progression, evaluating treatment efficacy, and understanding the impact of various environmental and genetic factors.

Interpretability and Explainability: A significant emphasis will be placed on making AI models interpretable and transparent. The candidate will explore techniques to ensure that the models produced are not just accurate but also explainable, providing healthcare professionals with clear insights into the model's predictions and decisions.

Exploring Interaction Networks: The candidate will analyze interaction networks, studying relationships between patient genetics, environmental factors, and treatment responses to identify key drivers of lung cancer outcomes.

Throughout the project, the candidate will not only gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge AI tools and methodologies but also develop a deeper understanding of AI's role in healthcare. This project provides an impactful opportunity to contribute to a field where AI innovation can directly improve patient outcomes.

The optimization will ensure the cost and losses minimization while ensuring a safe integration of renewable energy (of variable nature) also considering the availability of flexible demand and energy storage systems. The use cases will include normal operation and also contingencies. The optimization will include security constrained optimal power flow. Some use cases will include large scale continental grids and potentially offshore wind power plants connected to offshore energy hubs. Other use cases will be focused on distribution networks.

What is Emergence? Emergence refers to the phenomenon where a complex system exhibits properties or behaviors that its individual components do not possess in isolation. These emergent features arise only when the components interact within a broader context. In philosophy, science, and art, emergence plays a pivotal role in theories related to integrative levels and complex systems. For example, life, as studied in biology, emerges from the underlying chemistry and physics of biological processes.

Emergence in Large Language Models Recent research has highlighted emergent behavior in Large Language Models (LLMs). These models, such as GPT-3, exhibit surprising capabilities beyond their individual components (words or tokens). The interactions between countless parameters give rise to emergent linguistic abilities, including natural language understanding, generation, and context-based reasoning. For further details, refer to https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07682

What is Assembly Theory (AT)? Assembly Theory (AT) provides a novel framework for quantifying complexity without altering fundamental physical laws. Unlike traditional point-particle models, AT defines objects based on their potential formation histories. These "objects" can exhibit evidence of selection within well-defined boundaries. AT allows us to explore emergent properties by considering how components assemble into coherent entities, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of complex systems. See this paper for further information: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

Research Goals: This thesis aims to apply Assembly Theory to understand emergence in Large Language Models. We will test AT in this particular set emergence problem.

State-of-the-art models such as LLMs are too large to fit in a single compute node (GPU, NPU, CPU), both for training and inference on a device (e.g., phone, laptop, tablet) or in larger-scale data centers. There is a need to develop optimization techniques to split and place these models onto a distributed set of compute nodes so that the overall system performance is maximized. The research will be focused on optimizing the placement of AI models onto distributed systems considering training time, energy consumption, and computational resources. 

In this thesis, the student will model and simulate distributed AI workloads using both mathematical frameworks and simulators. This encompasses the modeling of network, compute, and memory components within a distributed architecture. Developing new modules to enhance the modeling process. Evaluating and optimizing various parallelization techniques to improve overall system performance.

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech offers Master thesis fellowships in the field of LLM training. The research will be supported by Qualcomm and will be carried out in an environment with a strong interaction with leading experts in the field, with opportunities for doing internships in the company.

More information here: https://www.cs.upc.edu/~jordicf/priv/eda/llm_qc.html

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique that measures changes in oxygenated (HbO2) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) in the cerebral cortex. Due to its portability and low cost, fNIRS has been used in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) applications, characterizing hemodynamic responses to varying stimuli, and investigating auditory and visual-spatial attention during Complex Scene Analysis (CSA). In this project, we want to design and implement an fNIRS study with a goal of studying the impact of neural and BCI outcomes to improving the training of LAI models' attention mechanism (e.g., Transformer attention) during reading comprehension tasks (e.g., the participants will be judging the quality of generated text). We want to demonstrate experimentally that augmenting a model with fNIRS data carries neural activity features complementing the information captured by the model and demonstrate that it improves the models' performance. To this end, we will have to collect data from participants and test how different Transformer models benefit from different types of fNIRS attention masks.

The candidate will:

• Carry out controlled studies and collect data from a number of participants.
• Try different approaches to incorporating fNIRS signal in the training process of DL/LLM models and compare against baselines/experiments (these should be replicated).
• Carry out ablation studies, personalisation techniques, error analyses, etc.
• Contribute to authoring a scientific article

Eye movement features are considered to be direct signals reflecting human attention distribution with a low cost to obtain, inspiring researchers to augment language models with eye-tracking (ET) data. In this project, we want to investigate how to operationalise eye tracking (ET) features, such as first fixation duration (FFD) and total reading time (TRT), as the cognitive signals to augment LAI models' attention mechanism (e.g., Transformer attention) during training. We want to demonstrate experimentally that augmenting a model with ET data carries linguistic features complementing the information captured by the model and demonstrate that it improves the models' performance. To this end, we will have to collect data from participants and test how different Transformer models benefit from different types of ET attention masks.

The candidate will:

• Carry out controlled studies and collect data from a number of participants.
• Try different approaches to incorporating gaze features in the training process of DL/LLM models and compare against baselines/experiments (these should be replicated).
• Carry out ablation studies, personalisation techniques, error analyses, etc.
• Contribute to authoring a scientific article

Recent advancements in nanotechnology have enabled the development of means for sensing and wireless communications with unprecedented miniaturization and capabilities, to the point that they can be introduced into the gastrointestinal tract inside a pill or into the bloodstream in the form of passively flowing nanomachines. 

This opens the door to the idea of intra-body communication networks, this is, a swarm of nanosensors inside the human body that use communications to coordinate their actions to sense and localize specific events (lack of oxygen, biomarkers, etc). This can lead to the development of applications such as continuous monitoring of diabetes, detection and localization of cancer micro-tumors, or early detection of blood clots. These possibilities are currently investigated by our team at the N3Cat (www.n3cat.upc.edu).

In this context, we are looking for excellent and self-motivated individuals who are eager to work on developing AI schemes (based on graph neural networks or multi-agent RL) for the detection and localization of events inside of the human body. Data will be gathered with an in-house simulator that integrates mobility models (BloodVoyagerS) and communication models (TeraSim).

Quantum computers promise exponential improvements over conventional ones due to the extraordinary properties of qubits. However, a quantum computer faces many challenges relative to the movement of qubits which is completely different from the movement of classical data. This thesis delves into these challenges and proposes solutions to create scalable quantum computing systems and the algorithms that run within them, following the current European projects at N3Cat (www.n3cat.upc.edu) on scalable quantum computing.

The interested candidate will work in a group of several PhD students and in collaboration with Universitat Politècnica de València, working in ONE of the following areas:

• Study the use of AI to model quantum computers or to assist in the development of architectural methods (qubit mapping, qubit partitioning, qubit routing).
• Study the potential scaling and adaptation of the existing quantum computing architectures to specific quantum machine learning algorithms (QAOA, VQE, others).

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are becoming one of the most significant cybersecurity challenges nowadays. These attacks are characterized by being developed in a stealthy manner and over long periods of time (e.g., months or years), causing financial losses, data breaches, and operational disruptions. Famous examples of APTs are the SolarWinds cyber-attack and NotPetya, affecting multiple government agencies and global enterprises like Maersk. To defend from such threats, methods based on audit logs have been widely developed to detect suspicious behaviors in the system. Specifically, cybersecurity experts switched their attention to data provenance to develop tools and methods to combat APTs. Data provenance consists of parsing system logs and building provenance graphs that describe the entire system execution.

The objective of this thesis is to develop novel ML-based techniques for detecting APTs. During this project, the student will work with industry experts from Telefónica towards the design and implementation of a new set of tools for anomaly detection in audit logs. The student will gain hands-on experience in working with real-world datasets and will acquire technical skills to develop state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques. In addition, the student will gain experience in graph-based ML, sequence modeling, and advanced embedding techniques.

Objectives:

· Design and develop novel pipelines for processing system log information.
· Research, apply and develop state-of-the-art methods in anomaly detection and cyber threat intelligence.
· Develop techniques for provenance-based intrusion detection systems to trace attack patterns.
· Contribute to research publications and technical documentation to communicate the results to international venues or conferences.

Seeing that not all neural networks fit to all problems, and that relational data is present in a wide variety of aspects of our daily life, the main focus of this thesis in N3Cat (www.n3cat.upc.edu) and BNN-UPC (www.bnn.upc.edu) is to explore the possibilities of the Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), whose aim is to learn and model graph-structured relational data. We are looking for students willing to study the uses, architectures, and algorithms of GNNs. To this end, the candidate will work on ONE of the following areas:

• Uses: Applying GNNs in emerging application areas, including but not limited to (1) electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis for Alzheimer's disease detection, epilepsy classification, motor imagery; (2) acceleration of the compilation of quantum computing algorithms
• Architectures: Investigating ways to accelerate the processing of GNNs in multiple computing platforms (CPU, GPU, accelerators).
• Algorithms: Developing meta-learning data-driven models to estimate the accuracy of a GNN for a given graph, without training, through synthetic graph generation and correlation analysis.