Cyber-physical and Internet-of-Things (CPS/IoT) systems offer dramatic potential for revolutionizing many aspects of modern life by facilitating collection, analysis, and action on fine-grained sensor data. In both consumer-facing systems (e.g. smart locks, cameras, and thermostats) as well as infrastructure and industrial settings (e.g. devices to monitor factories or electricity distribution systems), CPS/IoT systems are already responsible for a wide range of safety-critical functions with significant security implications.

The goal of this project is to leverage and improve upon the capabilities of honey bees as agricultural pollinators by incorporating them into Bio-Cyber Physical systems. Rapid advances are needed to aid a dwindling agricultural workforce, increase crop yield to sustain the growing population, and provide targeted crop care to limit the need for broad pesticide treatments. These challenges may well be addressed by autonomous mobile robots and sensor networks; unfortunately, agricultural landscapes represent vast, complicated, and dynamic environments that complicate long term operation.

Energy storage and power distribution play an integral part in the engineered systems that play critical roles in people's everyday lives, including transportation, utility, health, and security. In today's cyber-physical platforms, however, the generation, storage, allocation, and distribution of energy among modules is often managed in a haphazard and rigid manner that is fixed at the system design stage.

The project will research a new process for manufacturing large-scale libraries of synthetic DNA oligonucleotides, which are widely used in genomics research and are now being considered as a medium for long-term archival data storage. The current price for synthesizing DNA using microarray technology is 10 cents per base, equivalent to about $3,500 per Megabyte of storage. This project attempts to reduce the cost of DNA synthesis from 10 cents to around 0.007 cents per base using computer-controlled, high-throughput sorting.

Smart cities, connected vehicles, smart homes, and connected healthcare devices are examples of how the Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to revolutionize our lives in the decades ahead by exploiting a wealth of user-specific data to significantly improve user experiences. However, sharing of such data can compromise a user's privacy, and this threat to user-privacy has emerged as a critical risk to the widespread adoption of IoT.

The goal of this research is to gain a fundamental understanding of the integrated actuation, embedded sensing, reactive control, and distributed control needs of a cyber-physical, synthetic, distributed sensing, soft and modular tissue (sTISSUE). Realizing this cyber-physical, physiological testbed will enable surgically relevant tasks, procedures, and devices to be much more refined ahead of animal testing, which can be dramatically reduced with such high-fidelity simulators.

This project aims to empower ordinary citizens to take charge in collecting real time environmental data that can be used to serve a common interest. The target application of the project is a cyber-physical system for detecting small amounts of explosive vapor in the air so as to protect large-area public gatherings. In this system, extremely low-cost explosive sensors, handed out free of charge, will be connected to the smart phones of the willing participants, effectively turning each one of them into a look-out sensor node.

The growth and expansion of cities since the mid 20th century has led to a strong dependency on private automobiles. During the last years, urban planners have started rethinking the mobility modes in a city and have finally realized that a truly sustainable transportation and urban environment in general, requires a shift to multimodal transportation. In the PittSmartLiving project, we view the shift to multimodal transportation in a holistic way.

This project aims to empower ordinary citizens to take charge in collecting real time environmental data that can be used to serve a common interest. The target application of the project is a cyber-physical system for detecting small amounts of explosive vapor in the air so as to protect large-area public gatherings. In this system, extremely low-cost explosive sensors, handed out free of charge, will be connected to the smart phones of the willing participants, effectively turning each one of them into a look-out sensor node.

This project aims to empower ordinary citizens to take charge in collecting real time environmental data that can be used to serve a common interest. The target application of the project is a cyber-physical system for detecting small amounts of explosive vapor in the air so as to protect large-area public gatherings. In this system, extremely low-cost explosive sensors, handed out free of charge, will be connected to the smart phones of the willing participants, effectively turning each one of them into a look-out sensor node.