CPS: Synergy: Self-Sustainable Data-Driven Systems In the Field
Lead PI:
Kai Shen
Co-Pi:
Abstract
Data-driven intelligence is an essential foundation for physical systems in transportation safety and efficiency, area surveillance and security, as well as environmental sustainability. This project develops new computer system infrastructure and algorithms for self-sustainable data-driven systems in the field. Research outcomes of the project include (a) a low-maintenance, environmentally-friendly hardware platform with solar energy harvesting and super capacitor-based energy storage, (b) virtualization software infrastructure for low-power nodes to enable inter-operability among distributed field nodes and from/to the data center, and (c) new image and data processing approaches for resource-adaptive fidelity adjustment and function partitioning. The synergy between the self-sustainable hardware, system software support, wireless communications management, and application data processing manifests through global coordination for quality-of-service, energy efficiency, and data privacy. In broader impacts, this project enables data-driven intelligence in the field for important physical system domains. Integration of the technologies involved is accomplished through real-world system deployment and experimentation, including an intelligent campus traffic and parking management system and collaborative work with industry collaborators. The results of this project will further enhance the technological competitiveness for US industries in key areas such as intelligent transportation. The education component includes cross-disciplinary curriculum enhancements and the development of a new instructional platform for realistic experiments with cyber-physical systems. Within the scope of this project, the PIs perform mentoring and outreach activities to recruit/retain women and minorities in science and engineering.
Kai Shen

My research interests fall into the broad area of computer systems.  A principal share of my research has targeted the software system support for concurrent servers.  It started at around 2000 with my development of the Neptune server clustering middleware, which was deployed as the online software backbone for thousands of servers at the web search engine Ask.com.  It has continued to the present day (2013), with my most recent work of the fine-grained power modeling and power virus containment on multicore servers.  A dominant theme of my work has been to recognize the complexity of modern computer systems and then develop principled approaches to understand, characterize, and manage such complexities.  In particular, I have strong interests in the cross-layer work of developing the software system solution to support emerging hardware or address hardware issues.

Performance Period: 10/01/2012 - 09/30/2015
Institution: University of Rochester
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1239423