Research Experience

Table of contents

I have spent more than 10 years performing research, first at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany (‘14–‘19, earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science in ‘18), and then, more applied, at Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE, ‘20 – ‘25). During this time, I secured significant grants (> €1 million over 3 years), led complex projects and build effective teams, developed research infrastructure and prototypes as well as published influental research in the fields of embedded systems and safety-critical automation including cybersecurity and AI. Several works were motivated by EU regulations and industry standards. My contributions are summarized below.

Projects

At RISE, I worked on automation, AI, and cybersecurity solutions for safety-critical transport systems in sectors such as railway, maritime, and mobile machinery in tight collaboration with industry stakeholders in EU and national research projects. Major involvements:

• Chips JU AGRARSENSE (EU Grant No. 101095835, 2023 – 2025): As leading applicant and project manager for RISE, I headed a >1M€ project with a team of 15+ on a Komatsu Forestry AB-led autonomous forestry use case, developing safety and cybersecurity methods and autonomous vehicle prototypes (ISO 21448, IEC 62443; ROS2, DepthAI, YOLO, UAV).
• EU agrifoodTEF (EU Grant No. 101100622, 2023 – 2027): I led the design and deployment of the control system for “Drever 120,” an automated electric tractor with a four-motor (30 kW each) drivetrain and swappable batteries, showcased live to EU agricultural ministers and built on our open source WayWise platform (C/C++, Qt, CANopen).
• Europe’s Rail R2DATO (EU Grant No. 101102001 & TRV 2022/46318, 2022 – 2026): I led RISE’s effort with Trafikverket and European partners to upgrade rail networks through digitalisation and automation. Our team focuses on innovative signalling systems like Virtually Coupled Train Sets (VCTS), and cybersecurity risk assessment (IEC 62443, X2Rail-5).
• Vinnova ETAVEP (Diarienummer 2019-05838, 2020 – 2022): I prototyped a “SafetyZone” concept that estimates an automated vehicle’s dynamics before an emergency stop, demonstrated at the AstaZero proving ground.
• EU LASH FIRE (EU Grant No. 814975, 2019 – 2023): I led the development of a UAS prototype (PX4 drone, MAVLINK, C/C++, Qt) for maritime firefighting and rescue on ro‑ro ships, using onboard tests, surveys with 34 experts, and a SWOT analysis to validate automated fire patrol, resource management, and search and rescue capabilities.
• Shift2Rail X2Rail-3 (EU Grant No. 826141, 2018 – 2021): Contributed to definition of Virtually Coupled Train Sets (VCTS). Responsible for its business analysis.

Software

Authored / initiated two fundamental open-source projects which are actively maintained in several research projects:

• WayWise: Rapid prototyping library for connected, autonomous vehicles (C++, Qt)
• WayWiseR: Integration of WayWise and ROS2 (Robot Operating System, C++, Python)

Publications

Conferences & Workshops

• Avula, R. R.; Damschen, M.; Mirzai, A.; Lundgren, K.; Farooqui, A.; and Thorsén, A. “WayWiseR: A Rapid Prototyping Platform for Validating Connected and Automated Vehicles.” In 13th International Conference on Control, Mechatronics and Automation (ICCMA 2025), 2025.
• Gültekin, F. M.; Lilja, O.; Khojah, R.; Wohlrab, R.; Damschen, M.; and Mohamad, M. “Leveraging Large Language Models for Cybersecurity Risk Assessment — A Case from Forestry Cyber-Physical Systems.” In 1st International Workshop on Agentic Software Engineering (AgenticSE 2025), 2025.
• Avula, R. R.; Mohamad, M.; Sangchoolie, B.; and Damschen, M. “Towards Credible Simulators: A Validation Methodology for Safety-Critical Virtual Testing.” In 20th Int. Workshop on Dependable Smart Embedded Cyber-Physical Systems and Systems-of-Systems (DECSoS), 2025.
• Damschen, M.; Avula, R. R.; and Mohamad, M. “SAFE-COLOR: Safety-Critical Object Detection Benchmarks for Color Fidelity in Simulations.” In 2025 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2025.
• Mirzai, A.; Avula, R.R.; and Damschen, M. “Cybersecurity Risk Assessment of Virtually Coupled Train Sets.” 6th SmartRaCon Scientific Seminar, 2024.
• Mohamad, M.; Avula, R.R.; Folkesson, P.; Kleberger, P.; Mirzai, A.; Skoglund, M.; and Damschen, M. “Cybersecurity pathways towards CE-certified autonomous forestry machines.” In 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops (DSN-W), pp. 98–105. IEEE, 2024.
• Damschen, M.; Häll, R.; Thorsén, A.; and Farooqui, A. “Assessing a UAS for Maritime Firefighting and Rescue on Ro-Ro Ships.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation (ATT’24), CEUR-WS, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2024.
• Bauer, L.; Damschen, M.; Ziegenbein, D.; Hamann, A.; Biondi, A.; Buttazzo, G.; and Henkel, J. “Analyses and architectures for mixed-critical systems: Industry trends and research perspective.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Embedded Software Companion, pp. 1–2, 2019.
• Damschen, M.; Bauer, L.; and Henkel, J. “WCET guarantees for opportunistic runtime reconfiguration.” In 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), pp. 1–6. IEEE, 2019.
• Pöppl, A.; Damschen, M.; Schmaus, F.; Fried, A.; Mohr, M.; Blankertz, M.; Bauer, L.; Henkel, J.; Schröder-Preikschat, W.; and Bader, M. “Shallow water waves on a deep technology stack: Accelerating a finite volume tsunami model using reconfigurable hardware in invasive computing.” In Euro-Par 2017 International Workshops (held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, August 28–29, 2017), pp. 676–687. Springer, 2018.
• Harbaum, T.; Schade, C.; Damschen, M.; Tradowsky, C.; Bauer, L.; Henkel, J.; and Becker, J. “Auto-SI: An adaptive reconfigurable processor with run-time loop detection and acceleration.” In 30th IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC), pp. 153–158. IEEE, 2017.
• Bauer, L.; Grudnitsky, A.; Damschen, M.; Kerekare, S.R.; and Henkel, J. “Floating point acceleration for stream processing applications in dynamically reconfigurable processors.” In 13th IEEE Symposium on Embedded Systems for Real-time Multimedia (ESTIMedia), pp. 1–2. IEEE, 2015.
• Damschen, M.; Riebler, H.; Vaz, G.; and Plessl, C. “Transparent offloading of computational hotspots from binary code to Xeon Phi.” In Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), pp. 1078–1083. IEEE, 2015.
• Damschen, M.; and Plessl, C. “Easy-to-use on-the-fly binary program acceleration on many-cores.” In 5th International Workshop on Adaptive Self-tuning Computing Systems (ADAPT), 2015.

Journals & Book Chapters

• Damschen, M.; Häll, R.; and Mirzai, A. “WayWise: A rapid prototyping library for connected, autonomous vehicles.” Software Impacts, vol. 21, Article 100682. Elsevier, 2024.
• Damschen, M.; Rapp, M.; Bauer, L.; and Henkel, J. “i-Core: A Runtime-Reconfigurable Processor Platform for Cyber-Physical Systems.” In Embedded, Cyber-Physical, and IoT Systems: Essays Dedicated to Marilyn Wolf on the Occasion of Her 60th Birthday, pp. 1–36. Springer, 2020.
• Damschen, M.; Mueller, F.; and Henkel, J. “Co-scheduling on fused CPU-GPU architectures with shared last level caches.” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 37, no. 11, pp. 2337–2347, 2018.
• Rossi, E.; Damschen, M.; Bauer, L.; Buttazzo, G.; and Henkel, J. “Preemption of the partial reconfiguration process to enable real-time computing with FPGAs.” ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS), vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1–24, 2018.
• Damschen, M.; Bauer, L.; and Henkel, J. “CoRQ: Enabling runtime reconfiguration under WCET guarantees for real-time systems.” IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 77–80, 2017.
• Damschen, M.; Bauer, L.; and Henkel, J. “Timing analysis of tasks on runtime reconfigurable processors.” IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 294–307, 2016.
• Damschen, M.; Bauer, L.; and Henkel, J. “Extending the WCET problem to optimize for runtime-reconfigurable processors.” ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 1–24, 2016.

Theses

• Damschen, M. “Worst-Case Execution Time Guarantees for Runtime-Reconfigurable Architectures.” Ph.D. thesis, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), 2019.
• Damschen, M. “Easy-to-use on-the-fly binary program acceleration on many-cores.” Master Thesis, University of Paderborn, 2014.
• Damschen, M. “Concurrent shared memory access for Android applications and real-time processes.” Bachelor Thesis, University of Paderborn, 2012.

Public EU & National Project Deliverables and Other Publications

• Damschen, M.; Farooqui, A.; Häll, R.; Landström, P.; and Thorsén, A. “Development and onboard assessment of drone for assistance in firefighting resource management and rescue operations.” LASH FIRE (Grant ID 814975) D7.7, 2022.
• Lawenius, A.; Pearson, A.; Nordberg, P.; Broberg, T.; Frick, E.; Viklund, J.; Sjövall, A.; Wikander, L.; Dagerhorn, U.; McKelvey, T.; McKelvey, D.; Damschen, M.; Thorsén, A.; Johansson, L. “Enablers of Testing Autonomous Vehicle at Existing Proving Grounds (ETAVEP).” Vinnova Project Report, 2022.
• Damschen, M.; Vinter, J.; Iovino, S.D.; Canesi, S.; Ottonello, E.; Parrilla Ayuso, F.; Lanillos Carrasco, G.; Schenker, M.; Stickel, S.; and Goikoetxea, J. “VCTS – Analysis of the Business Model.” Shift2Rail X2Rail-3 (Grant ID 826141) D7.5, 2021.
• Wildermann, S.; Bader, M.; Bauer, L.; Damschen, M.; Gabriel, D.; Gerndt, M.; Glaß, M.; Henkel, J.; Paul, J.; Pöppl, A.; et al. “Invasive computing for timing-predictable stream processing on MPSoCs.” it-Information Technology, vol. 58, no. 6, pp. 267–280, 2016.