Academic curriculum vitae · Updated 30 September 2026
Siavash H. Khajavi
Assistant Professor of Operations Management · Aalto University
Founder and CEO · Detectium Oy
Research at the intersection of operations management, digital twins and multimodal artificial intelligence.
Research focus
Choose an area to explore related work.
Profile
One programme across three research traditions
My work connects operations management with multimodal artificial intelligence. It began with the structure of distributed manufacturing and digital spare-parts supply chains, expanded into the boundaries and engineering of digital twins, and now asks how machines can reason across visible, thermal and simulated evidence.
The connecting problem is practical: how to represent an operation well enough that people and AI systems can understand its state, make a defensible decision and act safely.
Career
Academic research, industrial delivery and company building
Assistant Professor of Operations Management
Aalto University · Department of Industrial Engineering and Management
Tenure-track group leader and responsible teacher for Advanced Operations Management.
Founder and CEO
Detectium Oy · Helsinki
Commercialising digital-twin data generation and multimodal AI detection for safety-critical environments.
Postdoctoral researcher and project manager
Aalto University
Led and delivered four EIT Digital innovation activities with European industrial partners.
Visiting postdoctoral researcher
Nanyang Technological University · Singapore
Research on additive manufacturing and supply-chain complexity.
Visiting doctoral researcher
University of Nottingham · United Kingdom
Industrial polymer additive-manufacturing experiments at the Centre for Additive Manufacturing.
Doctoral researcher
Aalto University
Operations-management research on additive manufacturing and digital spare parts.
Research assistant
Aalto University · BIT Research Centre
Aerospace spare-parts research that became the MSc thesis and a signature publication.
Education
Two doctorates and an operations-management foundation
PhD · Digital Technology and Entrepreneurship
EIT Digital Doctoral School · Industrial track
Business Development Analysis for a European Tech Startup
PhD · Industrial Engineering and Management
Aalto University · School of Science
Aalto Dissertation Award 2019 · top 10% of doctoral dissertations
MSc · Industrial Engineering and Management
Aalto University · Service Management and Engineering
Two national best-thesis prizes
Funding and delivery
Research translated into working programmes
Tenure-track research funding
Managed independently as principal investigator, supporting the group’s research and doctoral work.
Four EIT Digital activities
All delivered successfully, spanning cyber-physical software, lighting simulation, digital-twin safety and AI for fire prevention.
Selected work
Selected contributions, with role and substance visible
10 selected contributions shown
P1 DetectiumFire: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Dataset Bridging Vision and Language for Fire Understanding NeurIPS 2025 · Datasets and Benchmarks 2025
Liu, Z., Khajavi, S.H., Jiang, G.
- Contribution
- An open multimodal resource with 22,500 images, 2,500 videos and paired vision-language annotations, released with trained baseline models.
- Role
- Senior and corresponding author; set the research question, funding and design, and supervised the first author.
- Format
- Dataset and conference paper
P2 Vision–language model-enabled cyberphysical link: emerging possibilities for production and operations management International Journal of Production Research 2026
Khajavi, S.H., Jaribion, A., Liu, Z., Wuest, T., Agrawal, T.K., Tiitola, V., Holmström, J.
- Contribution
- Maps vision-language models onto the cyber-physical link in production and operations management and identifies where reasoning has advanced beyond observation.
- Role
- First author; originated the framing and led an international author team.
- Format
- Journal article
P3 Multimodal anomaly estimation and synthetic fire-detection data WO 2024/149936 A1 and Finnish application FI 20237144 2023–2024
Khajavi, S.H.
- Contribution
- Methods that fuse thermal, image and 3D-model data to locate anomalies and generate training data where real observations are difficult to collect.
- Role
- Sole inventor and founder of Detectium Oy, the commercial route for the methods.
- Format
- Patent applications
P4 Targeting Misalignment: A Conflict-Aware Framework for Reward-Model-based LLM Alignment AAAI 2026 2026
Liu, Z., Khajavi, S.H., Jiang, G., Liu, X.
- Contribution
- A method for handling conflicting objectives when aligning models to reward signals.
- Role
- Senior author; supervised the work in the research group.
- Format
- Conference paper
P5 LLaVA-SCo: Teach Vision Language Models to Self-Correct CVPR 2025 Workshops 2025
Liu, Z., Jiang, G., Khajavi, S.H.
- Contribution
- An efficient mechanism by which a vision-language model detects and repairs its own errors.
- Role
- Senior author and supervisor of the work.
- Format
- Workshop paper
P6 RGB-Th-Bench: A Dense Benchmark for Visual-Thermal Understanding of Vision Language Models arXiv:2503.19654 2025
Moshtaghi, M., Khajavi, S.H., Pajarinen, J.
- Contribution
- More than 1,600 expert-annotated questions across 14 skills, testing 19 vision-language models on reasoning that requires a non-visible modality.
- Role
- Co-author; designed the evaluation.
- Format
- Open benchmark
P7 Digital Twin and Computer Vision Combination for Manufacturing and Operations Applied Sciences 15(18), 10157 2025
Faqeer, H.A., Khajavi, S.H.
- Contribution
- A PRISMA review of 29 studies combining digital twins and computer vision in operations.
- Role
- Senior and corresponding author; framed and directed the review.
- Format
- Systematic review
P8 Additive manufacturing in the spare parts supply chain Computers in Industry 65(1), 50–63 2014
Khajavi, S.H., Partanen, J., Holmström, J.
- Contribution
- Shows that distributed additive manufacturing can change the structure of a supply chain rather than only its cost.
- Role
- First author; conceived the study, built the model and ran the analysis. The work grew from the MSc thesis.
- Format
- Journal article
P9 Digital Twin: Vision, Benefits, Boundaries, and Creation for Buildings IEEE Access 7, 147406–147419 2019
Khajavi, S.H., Motlagh, N.H., Jaribion, A., Werner, L.C., Holmström, J.
- Contribution
- Extends digital twins to building lifecycles and specifies both what a twin can represent and where its boundaries lie.
- Role
- First author; led the conceptual framing and the sensor-based prototype.
- Format
- Journal article
P10 Hybrid digital manufacturing: Capturing the value of digitalization Journal of Operations Management 69(6), 890–910 2023
Stark, A., Ferm, K., Hanson, R., Johansson, M., Khajavi, S.H., Medbo, L., Öhman, M., Holmström, J.
- Contribution
- Theorises how digital and physical production capabilities combine to create value.
- Role
- Co-author; responsible for the manufacturing and operations analysis.
- Format
- Journal article
No selected work matches these filters.
The selected record and citation totals are taken from the supplied CV and Google Scholar snapshot dated 30 September 2026. The full publication record separates article evidence from AJG, ICORE and SJR venue classifications instead of combining them into a single score.
Recognition and contribution
Evidence beyond publication counts
Aalto Dissertation Award
School of Science, 2019 · awarded to the top 10% of doctoral dissertations.
Doctoral and master’s researchers
One completed doctorate in 2026, two continuing doctoral researchers, and three master’s theses supervised to completion.
Operations, AI and entrepreneurship
Responsible teacher for Advanced Operations Management and co-developer of AI Agents and the Real World, with 29 ECTS of pedagogical training.
Datasets, benchmarks and code
Open resources accompany work on fire understanding, self-correcting vision-language models and visual-thermal reasoning.
Research with a route to practice
Collaborations with KONE and ABB, four EIT Digital innovation activities, two patent families and the Detectium spin-out.
Reviewing and conference leadership
Reviewer for Journal of Operations Management, Computers in Industry and Internet of Things; workshop and minitrack leadership for 2027.