The focus of this proposal is to provide technical coordination for the 2013 Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Principal Investigators' (PI) meeting and multiple CPS-related workshops in the areas of Energy, Transportation, Medical Devices, and Agriculture in late 2013 and early 2014. The workshops, each comprising 50-60 leading academic researchers and government as well as industrial technology managers, will help the community understand the research challenges at the intersection of cyber-physical systems and these application domains, and help build research agendas for these domains going forward. Technical coordination to be provided includes creating web resources ahead of the PI meeting and workshops; coordination and formulation of the program agendas via planning committees for the events; developing, editing, and archiving content from these meetings; and contributing to the writing, editing, and publishing of research needs reports resulting from these meetings. The broader impact of this project is comprised of the meeting/workshop artifacts, particularly a broad and compelling research agenda to guide future investments in cyber-physical systems R&D, particularly in the areas of energy, transportation, medical devices, and agriculture.

This proposal provides travel support for the NSF's annual Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Principal Investigators' (PI) meeting, to be held in Arlington, VA, on Oct. 17-18, 2013. The CPS PI meeting is the flagship event for the NSF CPS program. It is conducted annually, and provides an opportunity for all CPS PIs and co-PIs to interact with NSF, other government agencies, and industry. This particular award is to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will facilitate travel for the PIs and co-PIs of several CPS projects that are nearing completing. The participation of these PIs in the meeting will be of great benefit to NSF and the broader CPS community, as they will be able to describe the successes of the most mature projects in the CPS portfolio, including recent science and technology breakthroughs as well as the broader impacts that are emerging.

U.S. economic growth, energy security, and environmental stewardship depend on a sustainable energy policy that promotes conservation,efficiency, and electrification across all major sectors. Buildings are the largest sector and therefore an attractive target of these efforts: current Federal sustainability goals mandate that 50% of U.S.commercial buildings become net-zero energy by 2050. A range of options exists to achieve this goal, but financial concerns require a data-driven, empirically-validated approach. However, critical gaps exist in the energy and water measurement technology, and indoorclimate control science, needed to benchmark competing options, prioritize efficiency investments, and ensure occupant comfort. To address these challenges, this project proposes a new kind of "peel-and-stick" sensor that can be affixed to everyday objects to infer their contributions to whole-building resource consumption. To use the sensors, occupants or building managers simply tag end loads like a ceiling light, shower head, or range top. The sensors monitor the ambient conditions around a load and, using statistical methods,correlate those conditions with readings from existing electricity, gas, or water meters, providing individual estimates without intrusive metering. The sensors are built from integrated circuit technology laminated into smart labels, so they are small, inexpensive, and easy-to-deploy. The sensors are powered by the same ambient signals they sense, eliminating the need for periodic battery replacement or wall power. Collectively, these properties address cost and coverage challenges, and enable scalable deployment and widespread adoption. The intellectual merit of this proposal stems from the insight that the transfer and use of energy (and other resources) usually emits energy, often in a different domain, and that this emitted energy is often enough to intermittently power simple, energy-harvesting sensors whose duty cycle is proportional to the energy being transferred or used. Hence, the mere activation rate of the sensors signalsthe underlying energy use. The power-proportional relationship between usage activity and side channel harvesting, when coupled with state-of-the art, millimeter-scale, nano-power chips and whole-house or panel-level meters, enables small and inexpensive sensor tags that are pervasively distributed with unbounded lifetimes. But, networking and tasking them, and making sense of their data, requires a fundamental rethinking of low-power communications, control, and data fusion to abstract the intermittent, unreliable, and noisy sensor infrastructure into actionable information. This project's broader impact stems from an integrated program of education, research, and outreach that (i) creates a smart objects focused curriculum whose classroom projects are motivated by research needs, (ii) provides research experiences for undergraduates and underrepresented minorities, (iii) mentors students on all aspects of successful research from articulating hypotheses to peer-reviewing papers,(iv) disseminates teaching materials on embedded systems and research pedagogy, (v) produces students who bridge disciplines,operating at the intersection of measurement science, information technology, and sustainability policy, and (vi) translates scientific discovery and technical knowledge into beneficial commercial products through industry outreach and internships, and (vii) engages with the National Labs to ensure that the research addresses pressing problems.

The goal of this project is to demonstrate new cyber-physical architectures that allow the sharing of closed-loop sensor networks among multiple applications through the dynamic allocation of sensing, networking, and computing resources. The sharing of sensor network infrastructures makes the provision of data more cost efficient and leads to virtual private sensor network (VPSN) architectures that can dramatically increase the number of sensor networks available for public use. These cyber infrastructures support a paradigm, called Sensing as a Service, in which users can obtain sensing and computational resources to generate the required data for their sensing applications. The challenge in sharing closed-loop sensor networks is that one application's actuation request might interfere with another's request. To address this challenge the VPSN architectures are comprised of three components: 1) a sensor virtualization layer that ensures that users obtain timely access to sensor data when requested and isolates their requests from others' through the creation of appropriate scheduling algorithms; 2) a computation virtualization layer that enables the allocation of computational resources for real-time data intensive applications which is closely tied to the sensor virtualization layer; 3) a virtualization toolkit that supports application developers in their efforts to build applications for virtualized, closed-loop sensor networks. The sharing of closed-loop sensor networks leads to substantial savings on infrastructure and maintenance costs. The proposed VPSN architectures enable users to create their own applications without having detailed knowledge of sensing technologies and allows them to focus on the development of applications. VPSNs will contribute to the creation of a nationwide, shared sensing cyber infrastructure, which will provide critical information for public safety and security. VPSNs will also help to revolutionize the way undergraduate and graduate students from many disciplines perform research. Students will be shielded from some of the complexities of sensor networks and allowed to focus on their core research. To prepare students from the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at the University of Massachusetts to perform this kind of research, new classes in the area of Integrative Systems Engineering and Sensor Network Virtualization will be offered.

Designing software that can properly and safely interact with the physical world is an important cyber-physical systems design challenge. The proposed work includes the development of a novel approach to designing planning and control algorithms for high-performance cyber physical systems. The new approach was inspired by statistical mechanics and stochastic geometry. It will (i) identify behavior such as phase transitions in cyber-physical systems and (ii) capitalize this behavior in order to design practical algorithms with provable correctness and performance guarantees. The algorithms developed through this research effort hold the potential for immediate industrial impact, particularly in the development of real-time robotic systems. These algorithms may strengthen the rapidly developing U.S. robotics industry. The proposed research activity will also vitalize the PI?s educational plans. Undergraduate and graduate courses that make substantial contributions to the embedded systems education at MIT will be developed. The classes will focus on provably-correct controller synthesis for cyber-physical systems, which is currently not thought at MIT. Undergraduate students will be involved in research activities.

The goal of this project is to establish a theoretical and empirical foundation for secured and efficient energy resource management in the smart grid - a typical energy-based cyber-physical system and the future critical energy infrastructure for the nation. However, as a large distributed and complex system, the smart grid inherently operates under the presence of various uncertainties, which can be raised from natural disasters, malicious attacks, distributed renewable energy resources, plug-in electrical vehicles, habits of energy usage, and weather. These uncertainties make the development of a secured and efficient energy resource management system challenging. To address this challenging problem, a novel modeling framework and techniques to deal with these uncertainties will be developed. Threats and their impact on both system operations and end users will be studied and effective defensive schemes will be developed. The outcomes of this project will have broader impacts on the higher education system and national economy and will provide a scientific foundation for designing a secured and efficient energy-based critical infrastructure. The contributions of this project include: a theoretical framework, techniques, and toolkits for smart grid research and education. Specifically, a modeling framework for secured and efficient energy resource management will be developed to quantify uncertainties from both the cyber and physical power grids. Techniques based on statistical modeling, data mining, forecasting, and others will be developed to manage energy resources efficiently. Based on the developed framework, the space of attacks against system operations and end users from key function modules, attack venue, abilities of adversaries, and system knowledge will be studied systematically. Based on the deep understanding of attacks, novel schemes to prevent, detect, and attribute attacks will be developed. An integrated cyber and physical power grid simulation tool and testbed will be developed to evaluate the proposed modeling framework and techniques using realistic scenarios. This project will integrate research, education, and outreach. The outcomes of the project will be integrated into curriculum development and provide research and educational opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, including underrepresented minorities and CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service students.

This NSF-FDA Scholar-In-Residence award supports translational research in modeling to inform future medical device design and approval processes. It is supported by the NSF Cyber-Physical Systems program in the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Sudden cardiac death is the leading cause of fatalities in the industrialized world. One in five people in the United States is affected by some sort of heart disease and one third of all deaths are due to cardiac diseases with an economic impact of about $200 billion a year. Most of these deaths result from arrhythmias, particularly fibrillation, which is rapid, disorganized electrical activity. The classification of arrhythmias as either reentrant or focal is of clinical significance, yet is difficult to assess. The FDA is responsible for regulating the systems and algorithms that aim to make this important differentiation. Such differentiation is a complex task involving the analysis of complex spatio-temporal patterns of electrical activity. The objectives of this project are to identify the key features of fibrillation that models should represent, to compare how well (or poorly) existing models correspond to measured values of these features, and to develop models that better represent fibrillation. The project develops and extends cell and tissue models and explores the analysis of clinical, experimental and simulation data from the perspective of regulatory science at the FDA, including verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification (VVUQ). The project seeks to 1) validate and create new models that reproduce not only single-cell dynamics, but also experimental and clinically relevant physiological dynamics in tissue and 2) initiate a new developmental framework that the FDA can use not only to test cardiac electrophysiology devices but also to characterize and verify massive submissions of therapeutic compounds obtained by computer-aided drug design methods. The research is conducted in collaboration with the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at FDA, and is aimed at developing tools that can characterize and evaluate real-world performance of devices. This will help the FDA to better regulate and verify the safety and effectiveness of devices that are developed to treat and terminate cardiac arrhythmias. All results from this project will be made freely available to the research community and to the general public.

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Cyber-Physical Systems Program in the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Information and Intelligent Systems Program in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Computer Systems Research Program in the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and the Software and Hardware Foundations Program in the Division of Computing and Communications Foundations in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Sound plays a vital role in the ocean ecosystem as many organisms rely on acoustics for navigation, communication, detecting predators, and finding food. Therefore, the 3D underwater soundscape, i.e., the combination of sounds present in the immersive underwater environment, is of extreme importance to understand and protect underwater ecosystems. This project is creating a transformative distributed ocean observing system for studying the underwater soundscape at revolutionary spatial (~100 meters) and temporal (~100 seconds) resolutions that is also able to simultaneously resolve small-scale ocean current flow. These breakthroughs are achieved using a distributed collective of small hydrophone-equipped subsurface floats, which utilize group management techniques and sensor fusion to understand the ocean soundscape in a Lagrangian manner. The ability to record soundscapes provides a novel sensing technology to understand the effects of sound on marine ecosystems and the role that sound plays for species development. Experiments off the coast of San Diego, CA, and a research campaign in the Cayman Islands provide concrete scientific studies that are tightly interwoven with the engineering research. Oceans are drivers of global climate, are home to some of the most important and diverse ecosystems, and represent a substantial contribution to the world's economy as a major source of food and employment. The technological and scientific advances in this project provide crucial tools to understand natural ocean resources, by studying soundscapes at spatio-temporal scales that were heretofore extremely burdensome and expensive to obtain.

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Interdisciplinary Research Program in the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation in the Directorate for Engineering, the Computer systems Research Program in the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and the Robust Intelligence Program in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Integrated circuits are produced in billion-dollar chip fabs, which require many months of processing to go from a design to a chip. The goal of this proposal is to accomplish that in an afternoon, with a table-top process. Rather than etching or depositing electronic materials, as is done today, it is based on assembling digital materials. These use a discrete set of components, reversibly joined in a discrete set of relative positions and orientations. Those attributes allow positions to be determined by the parts, errors in their placement to be detected and corrected, dissimilar materials to be joined, and them to be disassembled rather than disposed. A conducting and insulating part type will be used to replace multilayer printed circuit boards, connectors and cabling for three-dimensional interconnect, inductors and capacitors, striplines and antennas. A resistive part type will be added for producing passive components, semiconducting part types will be added for active components, and magnetic and flexural part types for electromechanical components. This project will develop prototypes of the parts, the processes to produce them, the assemblers to place them, and the software tools to design with them. The research will progress in stages of size and complexity, reproducing the history of integrated electronics. First will be the equivalent of small-scale integration, using tens of parts with a 100 micron feature size. A test case at this level of integration will be assembling a radiofrequency matching network. Then will come medium-scale integration, using hundreds of parts with a 10 micron feature size. A goal here will be assembling a ring oscillator and binary counter. Finally, large-scale integration will use thousands of parts with a 1 micron feature size, with a goal of assembling a microprocessor. Computer-controlled manufacturing has progressed from subtractive to additive processes; this research roadmap will introduce the discrete assembly and disassembly of functional digital materials, to code the construction of complete systems in an integrated process.

This project includes organization of the 2013 Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Principal Investigators (PI) meeting. This will be the latest in a series of annual meetings held for CPS program grantees, at which they are able to present research results and collectively identify future research directions. Cyber-physical systems use computations and communication deeply embedded in, and interacting with, physical processes to add new capabilities to physical systems. These cyber-physical systems range from the very small to the very large, and can increasingly be found in a wide variety of technologies we use in our daily lives. The purpose of this annual CPS PI meeting is to discuss the latest developments in the field and to help develop ideas for future research. The attendees of this workshop will hear general plenary talks by leaders in the field, then participate in breakout sessions to discuss more specialized aspects. The meeting will feature broad, diverse participation comprising the CPS PI community.