In this CAREER project, the development of wireless underground sensor networks, which carries information through soil, is investigated. More specifically, the application of underground networking in agriculture is considered, where underground sensor networks promise significant reduction in water usage for irrigation. The objectives of this project are to establish the foundations of underground networking for the realization of underground sensor networks, develop hands-on educational tools, and provide experiences to facilitate the dissemination of these techniques to a larger audience including students and farmers. Communication performance in underground settings is significantly affected by the variations in soil conditions. Hence, the research activities are focused on revisiting the concepts of connectivity and interference under the influence of environmental factors such as soil composition, soil moisture, and depth. Moreover, a theoretical framework is developed to capture the spatial and temporal correlations in soil moisture for underground sensor networks, enabling the development of environment-aware communication protocols. The insights from these analyses are exploited to develop event-based cross-layer communication platforms that adapt to the environment in an energy efficient manner. Finally, an agricultural underground sensor network testbed is developed to evaluate and highlight the outcomes of this research. The educational components include bringing wireless sensor networking to the class, developing an interactive cyber-physical networking lab, and providing hands-on experiences for "little farmers". The realization of the underground networking techniques has the potential to transform the agriculture industry, as well as a broad range of applications including border patrol, perimeter surveillance, and toxic material monitoring.

This award is supporting travel for sixteen researchers to attend the Public Policy Issues in Cyber-Security and Privacy for Small Grid Technology to be held Chicago, IL, September 30th - Oct 1st, 2009. Background: The push toward more economic and cleaner electricity supply is spearheading the implementation of smart grid technology in the electricity industry. The effective deployment of digital communication and control technology in the smart grid raises concerns over cyber-security and privacy. While some of these concerns pertain to the technology aspects, there are numerous issues of a policy nature that have not been adequately explored. The goal of the workshop is to support dialog on public policy issues in cyber-security and privacy for smart grid technology. It will bring together interested stakeholders, domain experts, and policy makers from government agencies, national labs, universities, developers and vendors, industry associations, and consumer organizations from the U.S. and other countries. The workshop is designed to provide a forum for the in-depth discussion of the most pressing issues and to address policy requirements for providing practical ways to safeguard the cyber-security of the smart grid technology and to insure that the privacy concerns of individuals are effectively addressed. The sessions of the workshop will focus on thematic thrusts in the areas of need for regulation or self-regulation, the key policy musts, and the role of standards in the assurance of cyber-security and privacy. The workshop is co-funded by the McArthur foundation.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are characterized by extremely tight integration of and coordination between computational and physical resources. CPS integrate computation, communication, and storage capabilities through systems of systems that must interact with the physical world in real-time at multiple time scales and often at multiple spatial scales. The inherent heterogeneity and the non-deterministic operation of different components in these systems pose new challenges to traditional control, communication, real-time scheduling, and robotics disciplines. In conjunction with the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium in 2009 (RTSS 2009), this project helps to support a Ph.D. student forum to discuss (i) the set of interdisciplinary research problems that arise in the context of cyber-physical systems, (ii) novel applications that become possible thanks to the integration of computing, communication, and interaction with the physical world at scale, and (iii) initial system architecture that addresses some of these research problems. The primary goal is to help students (and the real-time community) recognize that cyberphysical systems are different from the over-engineered real-time embedded systems of the past, and to provide a forum by which students can discuss their proposal for addressing the complicated aggregate systems issues that arise in this context. As such, we need to encourage constructive debate on emerging research topics. A secondary goal is to encourage student involvement in new research directions and offer a channel to discuss and reward the most innovative student ideas in this exciting emerging research field. Advisors and students will be welcome to attend the forum, but the focus will be on training and motivating the next generation of researchers.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) allow computer systems to monitor and control the physical world in a new way that could revolutionize many areas of science and engineering. However, they are often too complex for non-specialists to use. The aim of this work is to develop new technology to manage this complexity, enabling scientists and engineers to use CPSs just like other tools and instruments. This research takes a comprehensive approach to macroprogramming -- the task of programming an entire network of devices as a single, programmable substrate. This research exploits global, network-wide information about a CPS provided by a macroprogram to improve traditional software engineering techniques such as testing, debugging, analysis, and optimization. New techniques are being developed that use global information to optimize system performance, automatically generate test cases, and reduce the state space for analysis. This work is developing new programming abstractions that allow the separation of the application logic from quality-of-service requirements and hardware requirements, improving code portability and reuse. This research will produce a comprehensive development environment for CPSs called MacroLab. The new tools developed will greatly simplify the process of their programming and make them more accessible to non-experts. By taking a holistic view of the network and its software, MacroLab will manage a range of complex, interacting issues that would be extremely difficult to manage by hand. MacroLab will be tested pilot studies, including environmental monitoring. A graduate CPS course will be developed. MacroLab will be used for course experiments and in senior capstone projects.

This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience.

This project explores balancing performance considerations and power consumption in cyber-physical systems, through algorithms that switch among different modes of operation (e.g., low-power/high-power, on/off, or mobile/static) in response to environmental conditions. The main theoretical contribution is a computational, hybrid optimal control framework that is connected to a number of relevant target applications where physical modeling, control design, and software architectures all constitute important components. The fundamental research in this program advances state-of-the-art along four different dimensions, namely (1) real-time, hybrid optimal control algorithms for power management, (2) power-management in mobile sensor networks, (3) distributed power-aware architectures for infrastructure management, and (4) power-management in embedded multi-core processors. The expected outcome, which is to enable low-power devices to be deployed in a more effective manner, has implications on a number of application domains, including distributed sensor and communication networks, and intelligent and efficient buildings. The team represents both a research university (Georgia Institute of Technology) and an undergraduate teaching university (York College of Pennsylvania) in order to ensure that the educational components are far-reaching and cut across traditional educational boundaries. The project involves novel, inductive-based learning modules, where graduate students team with undergraduate researchers.

A wide range of health outcomes is affected by air pollution. In March 2014 the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report that in 2012 alone, a staggering 7 million people died as a result of air pollution exposure, one in eight of total global deaths. A major component of this pollution is airborne particulate matter, with approximately 50 million Americans have allergic diseases. This project will develop and field the first integrated IoT in-situ sensor package tracking pollution and pollen to provide airborne particulate mapping for Chattanooga. Longer term it is hoped that the data collection approach and initial visualization tools developed in Chattanooga can be used to support a nationwide, open access dissemination platform on the order of Google's StreetView, but called PollutionView. Such scaling of the project's pilot results through a PollutionView tool will contribute significantly to a transformation of the Environmental Public Health field in the United States. The project involves real-time big data analysis at a fine-grain geographic level. This will involve trades with sensing and computing especially if the sensor package is to be deployed at scale. The project will help determine if real-time allergen collection and visualization can improve health and wellness. Thus, this project will combine Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and gigabit networks to address major health concerns due to air pollution. A working demonstration of this project will be presented during the Global City Teams meeting in June 2015 with an update in June 2016. Airborne particulate matter particularly affects the citizens of Chattanooga, TN. The objectives of this project are twofold: first, to develop and deploy an array of Internet of Things (IoT) in-situ sensors within Chattanooga capable of comprehensively characterizing air quality in real time, including location, temperature, pressure, humidity, the abundance of 6 criterion pollutants (O3, CO, NO, NO2, SO2, and H2S), and the abundance of airborne particulates (10-40 µm), both pollen-sized and smaller PM2.5 (<2.5 µm) particles; and second, to have a pollen validation campaign by deploying an in-situ pollen air sampler in Chattanooga to identify specific pollen types.

The proposal is to enable students from educational institutions in the United States to attend the CPSWeek 2015 collection of conferences, which are to be held April 13-17, 2015, in Seattle, Washington. CPSWeek is an annual international multi-conference for Cyber-Physical Systems, comprising five major multi-day conferences, multiple one-day workshops and tutorials. It moves from country to country each year. Attending the conference will provide students with a unique opportunity to listen to and learn from the keynote speeches, presentations, posters and demos on cutting edge topics on cyber-physical systems, and to network with both leaders and other young researchers in this area. CPS research is expected to have positive societal impacts in many areas, including transportation, energy, agriculture, water/sewage treatment, environmental management and manufacturing systems. These systems must operate safely, dependably, securely, efficiently and respond to events in real time. A key feature of CPS research is the requirement to cooperate across disciplines such as computer science, computer architecture and hardware, materials science and sensor design, software engineering, networking, and control engineering. In this inherently interdisciplinary field, where collaborations are essential, meeting other researchers is especially important. CPSWeek brings together the U.S. and international CPS research community. For these reasons, strong participation in this event, especially among students (our next generation of researchers) is important to maintaining and advancing CPS research in the U.S. In particular, this project supports students from groups and institutions that are underrepresented in the CPS research community.

The project investigates a formal verification framework for artificial pancreas (AP) controllers that automate the delivery of insulin to patients with type-1 diabetes (T1D). AP controllers are safety critical: excessive insulin delivery can lead to serious, potentially fatal, consequences. The verification framework under development allows designers of AP controllers to check that their control algorithms will operate safely and reliably against large disturbances that include patient meals, physical activities, and sensor anomalies including noise, delays, and sensor attenuation. The intellectual merits of the project lie in the development of state-of-the-art formal verification tools, that reason over mathematical models of the closed-loop including external disturbances and insulin-glucose response. These tools perform an exhaustive exploration of the closed loop system behaviors, generating potentially adverse situations for the control algorithm under verification. In addition, automatic techniques are being investigated to help AP designers improve the control algorithm by tuning controller parameters to eliminate harmful behaviors and optimize performance. The broader significance and importance of the project are to minimize the manual testing effort for AP controllers, integrate formal tools in the certification process, and ultimately ensure the availability of safe and reliable devices to patients with type-1 diabetes. The framework is made available to researchers who are developing AP controllers to help them verify and iteratively improve their designs. The team is integrating the research into the educational mission by designing hands-on courses to train undergraduate students in the science of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) using the design of AP controllers as a motivating example. Furthermore, educational material that explains the basic ideas, current challenges and promises of the AP concept is being made available to a wide audience that includes patients with T1D, their families, interested students, and researchers. The research is being carried out collaboratively by teams of experts in formal verification for Cyber-Physical Systems, control system experts with experience designing AP controllers, mathematical modeling experts, and clinical experts who have clinically evaluated AP controllers. To enable the construction of the verification framework from the current state-of-the-art verification tools, the project is addressing major research challenges, including (a) building plausible mathematical models of disturbances from available clinical datasets characterizing human meals, activity patterns, and continuous glucose sensor anomalies. The resulting models are integrated in a formal verification framework; (b) simplifying existing models of insulin glucose response using smaller but more complex delay differential models; (c) automating the process of abstracting the controller implementation for the purposes of verification; (d) producing verification results that can be interpreted by control engineers and clinical researchers without necessarily understanding formal verification techniques; and (e) partially automating the process of design improvements to potentially eliminate severe faults and improve performance. The framework is evaluated on a set of promising AP controller designs that are currently under various stages of clinical evaluation.

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are merging into major mobile systems of our society, such as public transportation, supply chains, and taxi networks. Past researchers have accumulated significant knowledge for designing cyber physical systems, such as for military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments, but primarily in relatively stationary settings, i.e., where spatial and mobility diversity is limited. Differently, mobile CPSs interact with phenomena of interest at different locations and environments, and where the context information (e.g., network availability and connectivity) about these physical locations might not be available. This unique feature calls for new solutions to seamlessly integrate mobile computing with the physical world, including dynamic access to multiple wireless technologies. The required solutions are addressed by (i) creating a network control architecture based on novel predictive hierarchical control and that accounts for characteristics of wireless communication, (ii) developing formal network control models based on in-situ network system identification and cross-layer optimization, and (iii) designing and implementing a reference implementation on a small scale wireless and vehicular test-bed based on law enforcement vehicles. The results can improve all mobile transportation systems such as future taxi control and dispatch systems. In this application advantages are: (i) reducing time for drivers to find customers; (ii) reducing time for passengers to wait; (iii) avoiding and preventing traffic congestion; (iv) reducing gas consumption and operating cost; (v) improving driver and vehicle safety, and (vi) enforcing municipal regulation. Class modules developed on mobile computing and CPS will be used at the four participating Universities and then be made available via the Web.