PRESS RELEASE

XIMANTIS Teams up with CERN on a €3.2 Million EU-project to improve Traffic, Transport and Safety of Fleets

Project funding approved; expecting substantial advancements in monitoring and decision-making real-time tools for physics and the transport industry;

ONSALA, October 4, 2021 — Ximantis, a Swedish start-up, announced today the start of SMARTHEP, a €3.2 Million, 4-year EU project, funded under the H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020 call. By training a new generation of early stage researchers, the project aims for concrete commercial deliverables in the transportation and mobility industry through advance real-time decision making and real-time monitoring of complex processes. Ximantis was selected for its expertise in decision-making technologies that is crucial for SMARTHEP. Consortium members include CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, IBM, KKT, Point8, Lightbox, NIKHEF, Lund University, TU Dortmund.

“We are on the verge of building a new kind of business focusing on European solutions that lower the costs of sustainable transportation for fleets, drivers, and government,” said Dr. Alexandros Sopasakis, Founder and CEO of Ximantis.  “This €3.2 million grant, along with the high caliber of our consortium partners, provides us the means to achieve our ambitions.”

One of the main commercial deliverables of SMARTHEP is the upgraded B2B XIMANTIS smart app for congestion avoidance and traffic predictions along with transport and logistics fleet software for edge computing and mobile platforms, using novel real-time solutions (hybrid/Attention ML networks) able to extract valuable information from big data streaming at a rate of hundreds of gigabytes per second. Furthermore, consortium members will also benefit from exploitation of joint intellectual property agreements.

CERN researchers in High Energy Physics (HEP) study the basic constituents of matter and their interactivity within the Standard Model (SM). Paradoxically, HEP researchers and the mobility industry face similar challenges while both share Real-Time Analysis (RTA) as a solution.

“RTA is the key for more efficient mobility and road safety. In live traffic, GPS data from vehicles and their routes are transmitted to a central analysis system. Any analysis and forecast of traffic must occur on a timescale short enough in order for a city to dynamically change traffic lights and/or reroute vehicles, reducing delays and congestion,” added Dr Sopasakis.  “This requires both ML and hybrid computing architectures for algorithm training, a challenge that parallels the complex problems researchers at CERN face such as tracking particles in a HEP detector.”

SMARTHEP brings together for the first-time scientists from the four major Large Hydron Collider collaborations who have been driving the developments of RTA in HEP, and key specialists from computer science and industry. It will enable HEP researchers to verify the SM to a high precision and to search for new, unexpected physics phenomena, shedding light on the fundamental components of matter.

“This presents us with a rare opportunity to fully-stress our system on such a grand scale and even explore possible use cases that haven’t yet been thought of,” concluded George Sopasakis, CTO of Ximantis.

For more information on Ximantis or project SMARTHEP and other services, visit www.ximantis.co


About XIMANTIS AB

Founded in 2014, Ximantis, a software company, offers data-driven traffic smoothing technologies for sustainable transportation. The company combines advanced AI approaches, Big Data and Stochastic Model dynamics to facilitate the commute of people and cargo, targeting more accurate AI predictions for improved mobility and quality of life. Previous grant awards include: Horizon2020, Impact Connected Car and Vinnova.

CONTACT:

Alexandros Sopasakis