Post by Elaine Wong

I am pleased to announce the publication of our paper "Explainable Root Cause Analysis for Unsupervised Soft Failure Detection in Optical Networks" in the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society. https://lnkd.in/grN4TraZ Led by PhD student Yuxiao WANG, in close collaboration with colleagues in #ScuolaSuperioreSantAnna and #UoM, this work proposes and validates an explainable AI framework that combines unsupervised learning with interpretable root cause analysis to enable accurate and trustworthy failure diagnosis. The framework addresses the fundamental challenge of detecting and identifying soft failures in optical transport networks when labeled training data are scarce. We look forward to progressing this work into deployed optical networks and welcome any opportunities for collaboration. This successful research visit would not be possible if not for the generous support of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology Visiting Fellows Scheme 2025 and Prof. Luca Valcarenghi. I'm grateful too to all the co-authors Emilio Paolini, Azarm YeganehFallah, Andrea Sgambelluri, Sourav Mondal, and Ye Pu for their support of Yuxiao and the work through their insightful discussions and technical expertise. Congratulations to everyone involved! With opportunities through #HorizonEurope, I look forward to continuing this collaboration and building on our international research partnership.   University of Melbourne, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, UniMelb, IEEE Communications Society