netidee Scholarships: Energy-efficient edge intelligence for IoT

Sabtain Ahmad was awarded the Critical Infrastructure Award by the Academy of Sciences for his dissertation project.

The starting point for his work is sensor-based power grids, transportation networks, and smart cities, which generate terabytes of data every day. Transferring all this data to a distant cloud causes significant delays and puts a strain on scarce backhaul connections. Processing data at the point of origin and bringing AI closer to the data source has far-reaching implications for time-critical applications, where even a slight delay of a few seconds in decision-making can have serious consequences.

Sabtain Ahmad is attempting to answer this fundamental, multi-objective research question: How can we bring AI closer to the data source without compromising the integrity and security of the underlying system, while ensuring that the edge AI system is scalable to hundreds of thousands of devices/sensors? He develops answers to these questions in his dissertation entitled “Optimizing Edge Intelligence for Smart Environmental Monitoring: A Framework for Energy and Communication Efficiency.”

August 2025

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