We’re excited to announce that Zahra Babaiee was awarded a Spin-off Fellowship for her project Efficient Visual Intelligence for Autonomous Driving and Mobility! Zahra’s Academic Host at TU Wien Informatics is Radu Grosu, Professor and Head of the Research Unit Cyber-Physical Systems. The project is endowed with 500.000€ and is set to run for up to 18 months.

The FFG Spin-off Fellowship meets Expedition Zukunft funding scheme is aimed at researchers who want to start a business based on their research ideas. The program provides opportunities for universities and research institutions to set the ground for future spin-offs at an early stage, and promotes knowledge transfer between science and industry. The application focus of the project is on autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS)—domains, where both computational efficiency and reliability are mission-critical. Through the FFG Spinoff Fellowship, market-ready vision models are now being developed that are highly efficient.

About Efficient Visual Intelligence for Autonomous Driving and Mobility

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have underscored the importance of embodied AI—intelligent agents that interact with their physical environments via sensors. Vision is a critical component for most embodied systems, requiring sophisticated camera data processing. Building on Zahra’s PhD research, explainable patterns and properties have been identified in convolutional Neural Network Architectures that enable significant efficiency gains and enhance model transparency. The project’s approach reduces the computational demands of the models, and they are tested on small autonomous robots and sidewalk platforms under real-world conditions. The goal of the project is to support the broader deployment of advanced vision systems in edge computing and safety-critical applications.

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