On May 15th, Georgios Sopidis successfully defended his dissertation thesis (pass with distinction), at the Institute of Pervasive Computing at Johannes Kepler University Linz. The work was supervised by Univ.-Prof Dr. Alois Ferscha. The committee was completed by Univ.- Prof. Dr. Paul Lukowicz (DFKI and RPTU Kaiserslautern) as external examiner, Univ.-Prof.in Dr.in Martina Mara (LIT Robopsychology Lab, JKU Linz) and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Josef Küng (Institute for Application-Oriented Knowledge Processing, JKU Linz).
The title of the thesis is “Cognitive Augmentation for Manual Assembly”. This work presents a hierarchical taxonomy of activities, categorized into atomic, micro, meso, macro, and mega levels, as a framework for understanding and analyzing industrial workflows. Additionally, it introduces a guidance system for sensing in manufacturing to apply artificial intelligence (AI) through the proposed abstraction levels in various processes.
The thesis illustrates the implementation of these concepts through real-world prototypes that bridge the gap between theoretical models and practical applications and utilize multimodal sensor data, such as IMUs and depth cameras, to classify and quantify activities, detect anomalies, and provide real-time feedback to workers.
Congratulations to Dr. Sopidis on this achievement!
