The purpose of this project is to plan and organize the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Principal Investigator (PI) Meeting that is scheduled for the Spring of 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. This meeting convenes PIs with active CPS Program awards for the 14th time since the program began. PI Meetings are primarily annual opportunities for CPS stakeholders comprising NSF-sponsored CPS researchers, industry representatives, and Federal agency representatives to gather and review new CPS developments, identify new and emerging applications, and to discuss technology gaps and barriers. The 2024 program agenda is community-driven comprising oral PI project presentations via panels, talks, poster presentations and demos of new CPS innovations and results, and networking sessions for PIs to interact. Federal agency program officers will provide status reports of the CPS program solicitation and address questions about preparing successful grant proposals. The meeting also will keynote presentations from invited leaders in the research community.
PI Meetings serves as the only opportunity where all of the NSF-funded CPS Principal Investigators meet to share their research, discuss new research opportunities and challenges, and explore new ideas and partnerships for future work, and to network over two meeting days. Specific to networking, PIs will have the opportunity to interact with industry representatives, government agency program officers, and non-governmental organizations with vested interest in CPS research and development at networking sessions scheduled for the arrival night, throughout the two full meeting days, and post-meeting after the meeting adjourns. PI Meeting are forums for sharing ideas across the CPS community and play a significant role in growing the community across a broad range of sectors and technologies, and performing outreach to others who have interest in learning about the program and participating as future proposers, transition partners, or sponsors.
Frankie Denise King is the Assistant Director of the Annapolis Technical Coordination Project Office at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (VU-ISIS), where she is responsible for managing the coordination of collaborative R&D activities on the Cyber-Physical Systems-Virtual Organization that are sponsored by Federal agencies belonging to the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) Program. Before joining VU-ISIS, King served as the Technical Coordinator for the High Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) Program Component Area (PCA) at the National Coordination Office (NCO) for NITRD for nearly seven years. Ms. King has over twenty-eight years of program development and management experience in domestic and international policy affairs where she has served in high-level capacities in the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government and the private sector. Ms King’s work experience spans several domains, including the areas of information technology R&D, economics, agriculture, trade, and foreign assistance. Ms. King received an MA degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1984, and a BA degree from Fisk University in 1983, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude.