Curriculum Vitae
Alexander Feldman
February 15, 2016
September 17, 1977
115 Felix Str., Apt. 16
Santa Cruz, CA 95050
United States of America
+1 650 8124720
+1 650 3978506
alex@llama.gs
Alexander Feldman is a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Prior to joining PARC, Dr. Feldman worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork and as a a visiting researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and at Delft University of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. (cum laude) in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) and an M.Sc. (cum laude) in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems, both from the Delft University of Technology. Dr. Feldman has over forty publications in leading conference proceedings and international journals covering topics in model-based diagnosis, artificial intelligence, and engineering. In cooperation with NASA Ames Research Center and PARC, Alexander Feldman co-organized the International Diagnostic Competitions (DXC).
model-based diagnosis, model-based automated fault isolation and recovery, model-based prognosis, testing and test generation, stochastic local search, satisfiability, constraint optimization techniques, abduction and non-monotonic reasoning, reverse engineering, algorithm design, automated reasoning, qualitative reasoning, signal processing, localization, temporal reasoning, hardware design, machine learning, simulation
Ph.D. (cum laude), Computer Science
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Thesis: Approximation Algorithms for Model-Based Diagnosis
Advisor: Prof. Arjan van Gemund
M.Sc. (cum laude), Computer Science (Technical Informatics)
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Thesis: Hierarchical Approach to Fault Diagnosis
Advisor: Prof. Arjan van Gemund
B.Sc., Computer Science
UE Varna, Bulgaria
Researcher
System Sciences Laboratory, Model-Based Reasoning Area
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Inc.
California, USA
Founder and President
General Diagnostics, Delft, The Netherlands
Technical Consultant
Nspyre, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Research Fellow
Complex Systems Laboratory
University College Cork, Ireland
Visiting Postdoc
Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Group
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Visiting Postdoc
Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory (DISAL)
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Postdoc
Institute of Information & Communication Technology
Haute Ecole d’Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud, Switzerland
Visiting Researcher
Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Embedded Reasoning Area
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Inc.
California, USA
Doctoral Research Fellow
Embedded Software Laboratory, Department of Software Technology
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Software Architect
Science and Technology BV, Delft, The Netherlands
Senior Programmer
Market Risk Management, ING Bank, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Senior Programmer
Zend Technologies Ltd., Ramat Gan, Israel
We design and implement a Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) platform for PARC. The purpose of this platform is to provide component-based rapid prototyping environment for building custom prognostic, diagnostic, and sensor-placement solutions. The platform provides automated analytics for optimal diagnostic and prognostic decision making, comparison of algorithms, diagnostic metrics, visualization and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) interfacing, code generation for diagnostics in control, instrumentation and data cleansing, signal processing, and others. The CBM platform can service electrical, thermal, mechanical, or hybrid systems. An important application of the PARC CBM platform is to diagnose thermodynamic systems. My responsibility is to prepare a CBM use-case for thermodynamic cyber-physical system, to work on the diagnostic design aspects of the framework, to design novel algorithms and metrics and to improve state-of-the-art in diagnostic and prognostics within the framework.
CATO is a Dutch national programme (one of the participants is the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Delft University of Technology) whose aim is to study mechanisms for underground CO2 capture, transport and storage. My role was to support one of the experiments and to develop VHDL/LabVIEWTM instrument for preprocessing and storing of large amount of measurement data. The instrument allows sampling of up to 32 analogue signals with soft-adjustable sampling rate and acts as an averaging oscilloscope to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the input signal. See http://www.co2-cato.org/ for more information.
Lydia-NG is a framework for Model-Based Diagnosis and is a continuation of my doctoral research. Lydia-NG bears resemblance to products such as DymolaTM and RodonTM, however, it targets the automation of the design and implementation of decision support and diagnostic systems. The task of diagnosing a system is typically more difficult than simulation as it requires multiple simulations for various parametric values and advanced analysis for mode identification. Lydia-NG provides modeling and scenario languages (and compilers); many state-of-the-art libraries for simulation, diagnosis, and active testing; tools and component libraries. Lydia-NG provides own optimized simulation engines similar to the ones in the Spice circuit simulator or in Modelica. See http://general-diagnostics.com/ for more information.
I have participated in this large National Centers of Competence in Research (NCCR) project during a two-year postdoc in Switzerland. The idea of the UWB project was to capitalize on the research and know-how on Ultra Wide Band Technology as well as multi-robot distributed search and localization techniques acquired in previous MICS phases. One of the main goals was to build a system that allows a team of mobile robots to locate themselves and other robots with high precision (order of a cm) very frequently (maybe once per second) and securely, in order to perform collaborative, such as distributed search, coverage, or mapping. The project was focused on distributed algorithms that can be efficiently implemented and on development of low power implementations on integrated circuits. I was responsible for the design and implementation of the receiver firmware and data acquisition algorithms. This project has been carried-out in collaboration with researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
Decision support system for diagnosis satellite electrical power systems. Genius takes model-based diagnosis one step closer to the end-user by analyzing the real-world case of the Goce satellite. I have applied model-based diagnosis and active testing to data simulated with the Simsat ESA operational simulator. The results showed very good diagnostic performance (measured by performance metrics) which convinced end-users that model-based diagnosis and active testing is a mature technology, ready to be used in a wide-class of real-world systems. This project has been awarded by the European Space Agency under the Innovative Triangle Initiative program.
The DXC Framework (DXF), developed jointly with NASA Ames and PARC, is a collection of programs and APIs for running and evaluating diagnostic algorithms. DXF allows systematic comparison and evaluation of diagnostic algorithms under identical experimental conditions. The key components of this framework include representation languages for the physical system description, sensor data and diagnosis results, a runtime architecture for executing diagnostic algorithms and diagnostic scenarios, and an evaluation component that computes performance metrics based on the results from diagnostic algorithm execution.
Lydia implements a big number of algorithms developed through my doctoral work. Lydia stands for Language for sYstem DIAgnosis and it is a modeling language and a reasoning tool-kit biased (e.g., there is support for health modeling) towards model-based fault diagnosis. One of the objectives of Lydia is to to implement novel algorithms which will push the frontiers of model-based diagnosis allowing efficient reasoning over larger systems. Responsible for the framework and modeling language design and implementation and the development of fast algorithms for model-based diagnosis.
The project Finesse (Fault dIagNosis for Embedded SyStems dEpendability) aims at the improvement of the accuracy of fault diagnosis when applied to electromechanical systems such as the Paper Handling Systems of Océ Copiers. The challenges in fault diagnosis are to infer maximum diagnostic information on the operational status of software and hardware components from a typically limited amount of (noisy) observations. Responsible for the modeling of the system and the design of algorithms for active testing, recovery and prognosis.
The Diagnosis Interchange Format (DIF) is an XML-based interchange format for Model-Based Diagnosis (MBD). Its main purposes are to allow sharing of diagnostic models, observation data and fault hypotheses, and to facilitate empirical comparative study of the performance of existing and future MBD implementations. Responsible for the DIF schema design and the construction of MBD benchmark suite.
Thirteen AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’16)
International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management 2015 (PHM’15)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2015 (DX’15)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2014 (DX’14)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2013 (DX’13)
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2012 (ECAI’12)
International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
2012 (KR’12)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2011 (DX’11)
Journal of Vibration and Control
Journal on Artificial Intelligence (AIJ)
Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS)
Journal on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC)
IEEE Transactions on Reliability (TREL)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2010 (DX’10)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2009 (DX’09)
International Joint Conference on Artifical Intelligece (IJCAI’13)
International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management 2011 (PHM’11)
International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management 2008 (PHM’08)
International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis 2013 (DX’13)
Workshop on Diagnostic Reasoning and Model Analysis at European Conference on
Artificial Intelligence 2012 (ECAI’12)
Third International Diagnostic Competition (DXC’11)
Second International Diagnostic Competition (DXC’10)
First International Diagnostic Competition (DXC’09)
Artificial Intelligence, California State University, Long Beach
Part of the summer university program which is an initiative launched in 2006 by
the Board of Higher Education of the Canton of Vaud together with several partner
universities.
Model-Based Computing, Delft University of Technology
Teaching assistant, but also designed the course and gave most of the lectures. This was
an optional first-year M.Sc. course and was attended by approximately forty students.
Model-Checking, Delft University of Technology
Teaching assistant
Ph.D. cum laude
M.Sc. cum laude
Best paper award at the First International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management 2008 (PHM’08)
Gold Leaf certificate at the Seventh Conference on Ph.D. Research in Microelectronics & Electronics 2011 (PRIME’11)
Proficient
Linux, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, Windows, ChibiOS/RT
C/C++, Boost, Qt, Python, PHP, Flex/Bison, LATEX
VHDL, Verilog
MPI, PVM
Markup languages, SOAP
Sybase, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL
Maple, Matlab, Modelica (Dymola and Open Modelica), LabView
Familiar
Java, Perl, Tcl/Tk, Prolog, Lisp, Pascal, Fortran
Hadoop
Dutch
English, Bulgarian, Russian (intermediate), Hebrew (basic), Dutch (intermediate)
Prof. Arjan van Gemund
Delft University of Technology
Mekelweg 4, HB 09.310
2628 CD, Delft
The Netherlands
+31 15 278 2516
a.j.c.vangemund@gmail.com
Dr. Johan de Kleer
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Inc.
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
USA
+1 650 812 4398
dekleer@parc.com
Dr. Stephan Robert
Haute Ecole d’ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud
Institute for Information and Communication Technologies
Route de Cheseaux 1
CH-1401 Yverdon-les-Bains
Switzerland
+41 24 557 62 95
stephan.robert@heig-vd.ch
[1] | Alexander Feldman, Meir Kalech, and Gregory Provan, editors. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis: DX-2013, 2013. [ bib ] | ![]() |
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[2] | Yannick Pencolé, Alexander Feldman, and Alban Grastien, editors. Proceedings of the Diagnostic REAsoning: Model Analysis and Performance Workshop DREAMAP-2012 at ECAI-2012, 2012. [ bib ] | ![]() |
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[3] | Alexander Feldman. Approximation Algorithms for Model-Based Diagnosis. PhD thesis, Delft University of Technology, 2010. [ bib ] | ![]() |
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