SIEMENS

Working in a team across different time zones can mean having to get up earlier or sacrificing your lunch break,” explains Dr. Yan Lu. She works at Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Princeton, where she has been head of the research collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) since summer 2010. Despite having to allow for time differences, she enjoys this type of intercultural work. When she was writing her doctoral thesis, she also worked with students from around the world. Only occasionally does she notice differences in mentality. “My program manager comes from Germany, and he’s very intuitive and straightforward; we Asians aren’t quite so direct,” says Lu, who is from China. “But when you’re working in a team, it’s very important to know how people think and feel.”

With her nine-member team, which comprises researchers from China, India, Germany, and the U.S., Lu is working on a building management system that uses automated load control to respond to grid needs. This method of handling mismatches between supply and demand eases the burden on power grids (see article "Automation’s Ground Floor Opportunity"). The interface between a power grid and a building system is a so-called smart energy box. The clever aspect of this device is that it even knows how much electricity costs at any given moment and can therefore tailor the power consumption of building occupants in line with their daily routines. The system is being tested in a building on the Berkeley campus. The university provides expertise in the research and development of decentralized load control systems. Siemens is responsible for central load management, equipping the building, and analyzing project results.

There’s a good reason why Siemens is working with Berkeley, which came in second in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities, right behind Harvard. Since 2009, Berkeley has been a participant in Siemens’ Center of Knowledge Interchange (CKI) program. CKI promotes long-term partnerships with renowned universities in major research fields such as sustainability. “It’s a classic win-win situation. The university gets to know what the relevant problems are for industry and can direct its own resources accordingly; and for Siemens, it’s very important to have access to basic and applied research as well as students and up-and-coming researchers,” explains Jack Hurley, who is responsible at Siemens Corporate Technology for joint projects with universities in North America.

Cultural diversity within a research group is extremely productive, especially when it comes to developing innovations. It provides much faster access to the latest know-how in Germany, for example, or to the requirements of the Chinese market, or to the needs of Indian consumers. After all, the products that are under development are destined for markets all over the world. “Research without borders is vital, because products and information are ultimately all available globally. There’s no point working in a vacuum,” says Professor Dave Auslander, who manages the project for Berkeley. He is also aware of the challenges that cultural difference can pose to this kind of work. The first barrier is language. It’s difficult to conduct a technical discussion with only a basic vocabulary.

“You Know…” Siemens also operates a CKI alliance with the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, which is home to some of the world’s leading experts in the field of control theory. “Our goal at MIT is to gather knowledge,” says Dr. Dragan Obradovic, who works closely with researchers there. Based at Siemens’ Research Center in Munich, Obradovic has headed a five-person transatlantic team since October 2008. He is a typical member of the global research community. Born in Serbia, he earned his doctorate at MIT, lives in Germany, has an Italian passport, and starts even German sentences with the English words “You know…”

With his fellow researchers from the U.S., Obradovic develops intelligent control systems that play a vital role in the building automation system being developed by Lu’s team, for example, and in self-regulating control systems for power networks. Such systems are based on sensors and actuators that collectively form a kind of intelligent nervous system. To process their output, however, an intelligent nerve center is needed — a controller that uses smart algorithms to reliably and sensibly process the wealth of measurement data generated by sensor networks. This can pose big challenges, especially when accommodating the effects of intermittent sources of energy such as the sun and wind on the power grid. Furthermore, the strain on the grid is set to increase in the future as more and more electric cars are hooked up for recharging. On the other hand, the batteries of such vehicles can help increase grid stability. Equipped with an intelligent control system, they will also be able to feed electricity back into the network (see Pictures of the Future, Fall 2010, Get a Charge!).

“Topics like grid management are universal, so research should be global too,” says Obradovic. In addition to developing control algorithms, the researchers in his team are investigating ways of ensuring that the requisite data packets can be exchanged more or less in real time and without loss. Even the pure discipline of mathematics can produce differences of opinion among members of an international team. “Different cultural outlooks can lead to friction now and then. But that’s good because you can learn new approaches to problems,” says Obradovic.

The roughly 6,500 kilometers between Munich and Boston are not impossible to overcome for Obradovic. “We’re very much geared to teleworking. Online chats, video conferences, and desktop sharing are all routine,” he says. At least twice a year he flies over to visit his colleagues in Boston or vice versa, because onscreen contact is no replacement for face-to- face meetings. Personal visits make it easier to see things from colleagues’ perspectives and understand their working environment.

The trend toward global research is unmistakable. Thanks to the Internet, we can communicate with others in real time anywhere in the world. Obradovic is already dreaming of a virtual 3D lab. In 20 years, he believes, virtual meetings between team members around the globe, or joint projects on online platforms will be a fact of daily life. “You know,” he muses, “I just don’t know what the limits of technology are. Someone may even come up with a better remedy for jet lag or invent faster airplanes!”