Profile Photo

Chi-Ching Hsu

Research Scientist

About Me

I am open to new roles and collaborations, feel free contact via email.

I recently completed my doctoral degree at ETH Zurich, worked between High Voltage Laboratory (HVL), ETH Zürich and Intelligent Maintenance and Operations Systems (IMOS), EPFL. My doctoral reserach project INCITE – Intelligent maintenance of gas circuit breakers was supervised by Prof. Dr. Christian Franck (HVL) and Prof. Dr. Olga Fink (IMOS) and cooperated with BKW Energie, Hitachi Energy, and Swiss Federal Railway (SBB), where I developed machine learning algorithms and sensing platforms for monitoring critical infrastructure (high-voltage circuit breakers). In addition, I was a maintainer for an open source Python Package HVL Common Code Base (hvl ccb), where we have setup test and CI/CD pipeline, ensuring having maintainable code, readability, and scalability.

My work spans explainable AI, anomaly detection, industrial sensing, and real-world deployment of AI technologies.

Outside of research, I enjoy building interesting software side projects, such as swisspro.tw (a Swiss train ticket optimization planning engine) and Japanese Car Plate Collector (on App Store).

Research Interests

Education

Dr. sc. ETH Zürich

ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

2021 Nov. – 2025 Dec.

MSc. Robotics, Systems and Control

ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

2018 Sept. – 2021 Sept.

BSc. in Mechanical Engineering

National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

2012 Sept. – 2017 June

Exchange Student in Mechanical Engineering

Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany

2015 Sept. – 2016 Sept.

Publications

XAI paper thumbnail

Explainable AI guided unsupervised fault diagnostics for high-voltage circuit breakers

Chi-Ching Hsu, Gaëtan Frusque, Florent Forest, Felipe Macedo, Christian M. Franck, Olga Fink

Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Volume 263, 111199, 2025

@article{HSU2025111199,
            title = {Explainable AI guided unsupervised fault diagnostics for high-voltage circuit breakers},
            journal = {Reliability Engineering & System Safety},
            volume = {263},
            pages = {111199},
            year = {2025},
            issn = {0951-8320},
            doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2025.111199},
            url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832025004004},
            author = {Chi-Ching Hsu and Gaëtan Frusque and Florent Forest and Felipe Macedo and Christian M. Franck and Olga Fink},
            keywords = {Condition monitoring, High-voltage circuit breaker, Fault detection, Fault segmentation, Fault diagnostics, Unsupervised clustering, Vibration signal, Convolutional autoencoder, Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)},
            abstract = {Commercial high-voltage circuit breaker (CB) condition monitoring systems rely on directly observable physical parameters such as gas filling pressure with pre-defined thresholds. While these parameters are crucial, they only cover a small subset of malfunctioning mechanisms and usually can be monitored only if the CB is disconnected from the grid. To facilitate online condition monitoring while CBs remain connected, non-intrusive measurement techniques such as vibration or acoustic signals are necessary. Currently, CB condition monitoring studies using these signals typically utilize supervised methods for fault diagnostics, where ground-truth fault types are known due to artificially introduced faults in laboratory settings. This supervised approach is however not feasible in real-world applications, where fault labels are unavailable. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised fault detection and segmentation framework for CBs based on vibration and acoustic signals. This framework can detect deviations from the healthy state. The explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approach is applied to the detected faults for fault diagnostics. The specific contributions are: (1) we propose an integrated unsupervised fault detection and segmentation framework that is capable of detecting faults and clustering different faults with only healthy data required during training (2) we provide an unsupervised explainability-guided fault diagnostics approach using XAI to offer domain experts potential indications of the aged or faulty components, achieving fault diagnostics without the prerequisite of ground-truth fault labels. These contributions are validated using an experimental dataset from a high-voltage CB under healthy and artificially introduced fault conditions, contributing to more reliable CB system operation.}
            }
Continuous monitoring paper thumbnail

Continuous Health State Monitoring of High-Voltage Circuit Breakers

Chi-Ching Hsu, Gaëtan Frusque, Olga Fink, Christian M. Franck

IEEE Access, Volume 13, 89819 - 89830, 2025

@ARTICLE{hsu2025continuous,
            author={Hsu, Chi-Ching and Frusque, Gaetan and Fink, Olga and Franck, Christian M.},
            journal={IEEE Access}, 
            title={Continuous Health State Monitoring of High-Voltage Circuit Breakers}, 
            year={2025},
            volume={13},
            number={},
            pages={89819-89830},
            keywords={Circuit breakers;Vibrations;Monitoring;Coils;Sensors;Degradation;Temperature sensors;Feature extraction;Vibration measurement;Motors;Condition monitoring;high-voltage circuit breaker;run-to-failure experiment;vibration signals},
            doi={10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3570535}}
          
IoT paper thumbnail

An IoT Sensor Platform for Predictive Maintenance of High Voltage Circuit Breakers

Zoltán Marcsek, Tino Gfrörer, Tommaso Polonelli, Chi-Ching Hsu, Michele Magno, Christian M. Franck

2025 10th International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces (IWASI), 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{zoltan2025iot,
        author={Marcsek, Zoltán and Gfrörer, Tino and Polonelli, Tommaso and Hsu, Chi-Ching and Magno, Michele and Franck, Christian M.},
        booktitle={2025 10th International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces (IWASI)}, 
        title={An IoT Sensor Platform for Predictive Maintenance of High Voltage Circuit Breakers}, 
        year={2025},
        volume={},
        number={},
        pages={1-6},
        keywords={Coils;Vibrations;Substations;Circuit breakers;Current measurement;High-voltage techniques;Integrated circuit reliability;Wireless fidelity;Testing;Predictive maintenance},
        doi={10.1109/IWASI66786.2025.11121959}}      
        
PHM paper thumbnail

A Comparison of Residual-based Methods on Fault Detection

Chi-Ching Hsu, Gaëtan Frusque, Olga Fink

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the PHM Society 2023 (Vol. 15, No. 1), PHM Society, 2023

@inproceedings{hsu2023comparison,
        title={A Comparison of Residual-based Methods on Fault Detection},
        author={Hsu, Chi-Ching and Frusque, Ga{\"e}tan Michel and Fink, Olga},
        booktitle={Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the PHM Society 2023},
        volume={15},
        number={1},
        year={2023},
        organization={PHM Society}
      }
        
IoT paper thumbnail

Transmission and Distribution Equipment: Providing Intelligent Maintenance

Christian M. Franck, Chi-Ching Hsu, Yu Xiao, Pascal Bleuler, Gaetan Frusque, Mahir Muratovic, Tommaso Polonelli

IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 2023

@ARTICLE{10045627,
        author={Franck, Christian Michael and Hsu, Chi-Ching and Xiao, Yu and Bleuler, Pascal and Frusque, Gaetan and Muratovic, Mahir and Polonelli, Tommaso},
        journal={IEEE Power and Energy Magazine}, 
        title={Transmission and Distribution Equipment: Providing Intelligent Maintenance}, 
        year={2023},
        volume={21},
        number={2},
        pages={18-29},
        keywords={Maintenance engineering;Voltage control;Bidirectional power flow;Asset management;Power grids;Intelligent control;Power system planning;Renewable energy sources},
        doi={10.1109/MPE.2022.3230968}}            
        
VCB paper thumbnail

Vacuum Circuit Breaker Closing Time Key Moments Detection via Vibration Monitoring: A Run-to-Failure Study

Chi-Ching Hsu, Gaetan Frusque, Mahir Muratovic, Christian M. Franck, Olga Fink

2022 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2022

@INPROCEEDINGS{9945354,
        author={Hsu, Chi-Ching and Frusque, Gaetan and Muratovic, Mahir and Franck, Christian M. and Fink, Olga},
        booktitle={2022 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)}, 
        title={Vacuum Circuit Breaker Closing Time Key Moments Detection via Vibration Monitoring: A Run-to-Failure Study}, 
        year={2022},
        volume={},
        number={},
        pages={254-260},
        keywords={Vibrations;Vacuum systems;Circuit breakers;Power transmission;Life testing;Prediction algorithms;Time measurement;condition monitoring;vacuum circuit breakers;short-time energy;vibration signals;run-to-failure dataset},
        doi={10.1109/SMC53654.2022.9945354}}            
        

Work Experience

Research And Development Internn

ABB Reserach Center, Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland

2020 July – 2021 Jan.

Theoretical and Computational Methods Group

Research Assistant

ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

2019 Sept. – 2020 July

Chair of Intelligent Maintenance Systems

Machine Learning Intern

Schneider Electric, Taipei, Taiwan

2018 July – 2018 Sept.

Thesis

Intelligent Maintenance of Gas Circuit Breakers

Doctoral Thesis, ETH Zürich

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christian Franck and Prof. Dr. Olga Fink

2025

@phdthesis{hsu2025thesis,
            copyright = {In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted},
            year = {2025},
            author = {Hsu, Chi-Ching},
            title = {Intelligent Maintenance of Gas Circuit Breakers},
            school = {ETH Zurich}

Data Acquisition and Machine Learning Algorithms for Predictive Monitoring of Circuit Breakers

Master Thesis, ETH Zürich

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christian Franck and Prof. Dr. Olga Fink

2021

Side Projects

swisspro.tw 省瑞計劃

Founder

Travel ecosystem targeting Taiwanese tourists visiting Switzerland, optimizing their travel budgets and navigating through complicated Swiss ticket systems

2026 - present

Japanese Car Plate Collector 日本車牌制霸

Developer

An mobile app for collecting Japanese car plates on the street

2026 - present

App Store Download

High Voltage Laboratory Kiosk

Developer and Maintainer

A kiosk system built with a Raspberry Pi, with a barcode scanning system, automated stock management, and transaction logging,

2025

Voluntary Experience

Python Package HVL Common Code Base (hvl ccb)

Open Source Python Package Maintainer

2021 - 2025

Python common code base to control devices, which are used in high-voltage research. All implemented devices are used and tested in the High Voltage Laboratory (HVL) of the ETH Zurich.