NSF Early Career Professionals Workshop on Exploring Frontiers in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract:

The community of early-career researchers has typically not been addressed by previous CPS workshops or PI meetings; engaging these individuals will foster new partnerships and collaborations, contribute to the growth of new and creative ideas that are foundational to CPS across multiple application domains, and will contribute to the nurturing of early-career PIs and prospective PIs in CPS. In this poster presentation, we provide an overview of the first CPS workshop targeting early-career researchers (e.g., late-stage graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career assistant professors). The workshop, which took place in March 2014, was multidisciplinary, and designed to focus on foundational CPS ideas applicable across multiple domains such as energy, transportation, and healthcare. During the workshop, participants worked to identify new and innovated research directions in CPS through brainstorming discussions, plenary talks, and poster sessions. We received over 80 position papers to attend the NSF Early Career Professionals Workshop on Exploring New Frontiers in Cyber-Physical Systems in DC, March 13-14, 2014. Of those papers, 50 were chosen to attend. The workshop consisted of two plenary talks, 6 invited talks from senior CPS researchers, 9 oral highlight talks from among workshop participants. Additionally, all attendees presented posters on new research directions in CPS and participated in 9 break-out sessions. The break-out session topics included: theories for distributed design, foundations of security, big data, interoperability, safe and trustworthy systems, automation and human-in- the-loop, energy and transportation, robotics, and new CPS domains and applications. After the workshop, eight participants were chosen to attend CPS Week in Berlin, Germany  to  present  their  posters.  Additionally,  all participants are currently engaged and preparing a summary report related to workshop activates and outcomes. The expected completion date of this report is December 2014.