Public Defence: Roar Elias Georgsen

Roar Elias Georgsen will defend his PhD degree in Applied Micro- and Nanosystems. The thesis shows how engineering teams can design their tools and work environment so that engineers get what they need to know when they need it, without information overload.

17 Nov

Practical information

  • Date: 17 November 2026
  • Time: 13.30 - 18.00
  • Location: Vestfold, Auditorium A1-36 - Horten
  • Download calendar file
  • Organizer: Faculty of Technology, Natural Sciences and Maritime Sciences

    • Link to digital participation (Zoom).

    Programme

    13.30: Trial lecture: Topic will be announced later.

    15.00: Public defence: Building Smarter Environments for Small Teams - A Model-Based Approach to Dependable Smart City Infrastructure in Very Small Entities

    Assessment committee

    • First opponent: Professor Claude Y. Laporte, École de technologie supérieure, Montreal, Canada
    • Second opponent: Associate Professor Javier Calvo-Amodio, University of Idaho, USA
    • Administrator: Professor Satyanarayana Kokkula, University of South-Eastern Norway

    Supervisors

    • Main supervisor: Professor Geir Myrdahl Køien, University of South-Eastern Norway
    • Co-supervisor: Associate Professor Emeritus Cecilia Haskins, NTNU
    • Co-supervisor: Asle Johnsen, Aiwell AS

    Defence chair

    • Head of Department Marius Stian Tannum at the Department of Microsystems, University of South-Eastern Norway.
Any questions?

Roar Elias Georgsen is defending his thesis for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Portrait of doctoral candidate

He has completed the doctoral programme in Applied Micro- and Nanosystems at the Faculty of Technology, Natural Sciences and Maritime Sciences. 

Anyone interested is welcome to attend the trial lecture and defence, either in person or online.

  • Read the thesis here (link to come).

Summary

Tools and work environments that reduce attention overload for small engineering teams as they build safer infrastructure

Small engineering teams build safer, more reliable infrastructure when their tools and work environment give engineers the information they need, when they need it. This doctoral thesis finds that designing flexible workflows based on the changing environment works better than relying on experience or on rules imposed from outside, and reduces engineers’ information overload.

Social media platforms are designed to capture attention, and research on how our surroundings steer our focus explains why they succeed. The thesis applies that research to observing engineering work over five years, in a network of companies, with a small Norwegian engineering company at its centre. 

The findings were consistent across the field studies. Know-how built into engineering tools helped more than individual experience, and signals built into the working environment resulted in improvements better than externally imposed rules. The environment was designed to be reactive. The tools monitored the engineers’ actions and provided them with what they needed, such as a review the moment a requirement was written or modified, or a salient visual warning when a newly discovered vulnerability affected their software. The engineers continued to reshape the tool environment in turn, and team and environment evolved together over time, which resulted in improvements following a positive feedback loop.

Most companies that build and maintain our infrastructure have 25 people or fewer, and the information they must handle constantly increases. In 2025, official sources reported more than 48,000 new software vulnerabilities, about 130 a day. AI now produces code and documents faster than any team can read them. In a small team, important warnings can be easily missed, and a digital error in a sensor network can mean flooded streets or contaminated drinking water.

For small firms, the main practical finding is that the flow of information should be designed as carefully as the final product. The thesis sets out four key requirements for doing this. Several of the measures proposed in the thesis take an afternoon to install and need no specialists. Otherwise demands that emanate from clients and main contractors enter the supply chain unchallenged, and without scrutiny by smart tools carry the potential to create unintended consequences.

A mathematical model, built on biological science into how living organisms learn by anticipating change and acting on their surroundings, is the foundation for the field studies conducted. This research treats the engineering team and its tools, within its working environment as one such ecosystem. The field studies evaluated the model’s predictions. 

About the candidate

Roar Elias Georgsen is CTO at Aiwell AS. The work was an industrial PhD at Aiwell, under the Research Council of Norway’s Industrial PhD scheme.