This activity is in response to NSF Dear Colleague Letter Supporting Transition of Research into Cities through the US ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations Cities) Smart Cities Partnership in collaboration with NSF and the US State Department. Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), an ASEAN city in Vietnam, is well-known for its traffic congestion and high density of vehicles, cars, buses, trucks, and a swarm of motorbikes (7.3 million motorbikes for more than 8.4 million residents) that overwhelm city streets.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) make it clear that intelligent systems will account for the next leap in scientific progress to enable a myriad of future applications that improve the quality of life, contribute to the economy, and enhance societal resilience to a broad spectrum of disruptions. Yet, advances in AI come at a considerable resource costs. To reduce the cost of AI, this project takes inspiration from biological systems. It is well-known that a key bottleneck in AI is the perception subsystem.
There is no question that indoor environments are often uncomfortable or unhealthy for occupants. This is an even more critical issue in healthcare facilities, where patients may experience the stressful effects of poor thermal, luminous, and acoustic environments more acutely. With complementary expertise from engineering and psychology, the proposed research is focused on creating a human-on-the-loop, responsive indoor environmental system with the potential to offer better quality of care in hospitals.
Many cyber-physical systems (CPS) have real-time (RT) requirements. For these RT-CPS, such as a network of unmanned aerial vehicles that deliver packages to customers? homes or a robot that performs/aides in cardiac surgery, deadline misses may result in economic losses or even fatal consequences. At the same time, as these RT-CPS interact with, and are depended on by, humans, they must also be trustworthy.
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
As autonomous systems start to operate in open, uncontrolled environments alongside humans, safety becomes a major concern. In applications in which human-operated systems and autonomous systems are in close interaction, the heterogeneity causes different agents to exhibit different behaviors under the same situation due to the differences in how they see the world and make decisions. For example, autonomous vehicles tend to be more conservative than average human drivers, leading to instances of confusion and frustration of human drivers when encountering an autonomous vehicle.
As autonomous systems start to operate in open, uncontrolled environments alongside humans, safety becomes a major concern. In applications in which human-operated systems and autonomous systems are in close interaction, the heterogeneity causes different agents to exhibit different behaviors under the same situation due to the differences in how they see the world and make decisions. For example, autonomous vehicles tend to be more conservative than average human drivers, leading to instances of confusion and frustration of human drivers when encountering an autonomous vehicle.
This project envisions mobile cyber-physical systems (CPS) where people carrying cell phones generate large amounts of location information that is used to sense, compute and monitor human interactions with the physical environment during environmental dislocations. The main objective will be to identify the types of reactions populations have to a given type of shock, providing decision makers with accurate and informative data-driven representations they can use to create preparedness and response plans.
The overarching goal of the proposed research is to derive critical information and characterization of large scale generic nonlinear dynamical systems using limited observables. In the present state-of-the-art in data-driven dynamical system analysis, all the underlying state measurements and the time evolution of these states are required. Access to all of the dynamical states measurements in real-world is impossible or expensive.
Active user participation in large-scale infrastructure systems, while presenting unprecedented opportunities, also poses significant challenges for the operator. One such example is electric power distribution systems, where the massive integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and flexible loads motivates new decision-making paradigms via demand response through user engagement. This project introduces a novel approach for intelligent decision making in power distribution systems to efficiently leverage flexible demand commitments in highly uncertain and stochastic environments.