Timofey Kruglov, PhD

Please tell us what fascinates you most about research.
Satisfaction of understanding something that no one else has yet understood. Russian science, contrary to western science, has long been, and still is in many areas, a-thing-in-itself. This difference leads to many surprises. For instance, methods abandoned in the West due to lack of apparent commercialization potential had been developed in Russia, disregarding their commercial value, revealing their hidden benefits at a stage which would have never been reached otherwise.

What makes research done at Bosch so special?
Bosch has an international R&D presence, including Russia, and creates hi-tech products in a variety of technological fields. We have a unique opportunity to unleash Russian scientific creativity and pipe it into R&D channels in multiple research fields.

What research topics are you currently working on at Bosch?
The recent advent of generative neural networks, such as disentangled variational autoencoders, has opened up an opportunity to design new systems standing on the shoulders of accumulated prior knowledge (big data). Neural networks process pixelated images, while engineering handles vectorized topological representation with a certain physical meaning. To relate one to another is my contribution to a greater collaborative project.

What are the biggest scientific challenges in your field of research?
Use of neural networks opens up enormous possibilities in designing new devices and materials. The neural network’s creativity is as high and extensive as the dataset it was trained on. If we are talking about physical devices or materials, this dataset comes from previously modeled or actually created systems. But can we transfer or merge the knowledge obtained on one set of systems to another set of systems? How similar should these systems be in terms of their functions or topology?

How do the results of your research become part of solutions "Invented for life"?
Many consumer goods will be "completely" optimized with respect to their performance and cost, meaning the highest value for customers, the lowest amount of materials used, created with the lowest effort, and most environmentally friendly.