Ashfaq Farooqui

I build and verify autonomous systems. I’m a senior researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, where I prototype embedded systems and tools and work out how to show they do the right thing. My PhD at Chalmers was in formal methods and focused on robot manufacturing stations. I collected data from robot cells and used it to learn formal models of how they behave, so we could spot anomalies and predict maintenance.

Since then I’ve worked in EU and Swedish research projects on automated driving, robots and drones, and lately AI agents for software development. My part is usually verification and validation, plus the prototypes and test setups needed to try things out on real systems.

During my master’s I was on the electronics team of the CFS14 Formula Student car. We finished third at Formula Student Germany.

In another lifetime, I co-founded PhotoElectricChefs, an embedded systems company in Bangalore doing home automation and hardware consultancy. I led the PCB and hardware design, helped start the Freedom Hardware Movement, an open hardware community under the Free Software Movement Karnataka, and ran robotics workshops for students.