WASP Community Building Summer School 2025
- Period
- 25–29 Aug 2025
- Location
- Ada Lovelace lecture hall, B-huset, Linköping UniversityCampus Valla, 581 83 Linköping, SwedenVisualization Center CKungsgatan 54, 602 33 Norrköping, Sweden
- Posted
WASP's week-long introduction for new PhD students: the program's research areas and clusters, lectures with group exercises, company visits in Linköping and a dome show at Visualization Center C in Norrköping.
- Overview of the WASP research areas and clusters, with a panel discussion
- Lectures and group exercises on network data, behaviour trees, data visualisation and sovereign data engineering
- Company visit to Qualcomm in Linköping
- Dome show at Visualization Center C, Norrköping
The Community Building Summer School is how WASP introduces its new PhD students to the program, and it is mandatory for each new class. The 2025 edition ran from 25 to 29 August, mostly in the Ada Lovelace building (B-huset) on Campus Valla in Linköping, with one day at Visualization Center C in Norrköping. It was organised by Stephanie Lowry (Örebro University) and Meaza Eshetu Abebe of the WASP Graduate School, and counts for 1.5 hp of my PhD coursework.
Most days paired a lecture with group exercises, and the evenings were for getting to know the rest of the class. The full schedule is on the programme page.
Monday: WASP and its research areas
After coffee and welcome kits, Stephanie Lowry opened the school and Daniel Axehill (LiU) introduced the WASP Graduate School. Karol Wojtulewicz, chair of the LiU PhD Student Council, gave a PhD student's perspective, and Natalie Pintar presented WASP's communication work.
The afternoon was an overview of the four research areas, 15 minutes each: autonomous systems (Karl-Erik Årzén, Lund University), AI/mathematics (Holger Rootzén, Chalmers), AI/MLX (Thomas Schön, Uppsala University) and software (Robert Feldt, Chalmers). A panel discussion on the research areas followed, then three WASP graduates of 2025 shared their experience, and the day closed with a mingle at Universitetsklubben.
Tuesday: network data and company visits
Fiona Skerman lectured on finding structure in noisy network data, followed by group exercises and a presentation of each group's results. In the afternoon we split up for parallel visits to Qualcomm, Sectra and the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) in Linköping. I chose Qualcomm.
Wednesday: robot planning, inclusion and the research arenas
Petter Ögren (KTH) lectured on behaviour trees and robot planning, again with group exercises. The afternoon was a workshop by WASP's Diversity and Inclusion Group (DIG).
Caroline Sturesson (LiU) then gave an overview of the WASP research arenas (WARA), and Jesper Tordenlid and Katarina Iversen (Combitech) presented WARA-PS, the public-safety arena where I take part with my maritime work (see the demonstration week 2025). Elias Nyholm (Chalmers) and Stefan Stojanovic (KTH) presented the WASP core technology clusters, and the day ended with dinner at Universitetsklubben.
Thursday: data visualisation in Norrköping
A bus took us to Visualization Center C in Norrköping for an introduction to data visualisation by Martin Falk (LiU), followed by a show in the centre's dome by Anders Ynnerman (LiU).
Friday: sovereign data engineering
The last day was about sovereign, scalable data engineering and distributed machine learning operations, with lectures by Raazesh Sainudiin and Amelia Andersdotter (VakeWorks AB) and a talk on sovereign operations by Jim Dowling (Logical Clocks AB), followed by group exercises and discussions. The school ended with an open Q&A, concluding remarks and an evaluation survey.