When writing papers for engineering conferences and journals, it is important to highlight how one's work is novel/new.
I often find myself repeating the word "novel" is sentences such as:
The novel control algorithm presented here....
but I feel this is quite tedious if repeated often. I sometimes use phrases such as
This work extends the state-of-the-art by...
but don't particularily like the sound of that either. I've looked in several thesauruses, and we often debate this question at the coffee table in our research lab, but we have not yet come up with many compelling alternatives. Are there any other suggestions for phrasing ways in which my work is "new"?