Many safety-critical cyber-physical systems rely on advanced sensing capabilities to react to changing environmental conditions. One such domain is automotive systems. In this domain, a proliferation of advanced sensor technology is being fueled by an expanding range of autonomous capabilities (blind spot warnings, automatic lane-keeping, etc.). The limit of this expansion is full autonomy, which has been demonstrated in various one-off prototypes, but at the expensive of significant hardware over-provisioning that is not tenable for a consumer product.

One of the challenges for the future cyber-physical systems is the exploration of large design spaces. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs), which embody a simplified computational model of the mutation and selection mechanisms of natural evolution, are known to be effective for design optimization. However, the traditional formulations are limited to choosing values for a predetermined set of parameters within a given fixed architecture.

Securing critical networked cyber-physical systems (NCPSs) such as the power grid or transportation systems has emerged as a major national and global priority. The networked nature of such systems renders them vulnerable to a range of attacks both in cyber and physical domains as corroborated by recent threats such as the Stuxnet worm.

Title: CPS: Breakthrough: A Mathematical Theory of Cyber-Physical Systems The fundamental challenge in cyber-physical systems is the confluence of distinct scientific and engineering models, methods, and tools for cyber and physical systems. Cyber systems are primarily about processing information. Physical systems are primarily about structure and dynamics, the evolution of state in time. This project develops a mathematical theory of cyber-physical systems that provides a formal interface between the cyber and the physical.

Despite many advances in vehicle automation, much remains to be done: the best autonomous vehicle today still lags behind human drivers, and connected vehicle (V2V) and infrastructure (V2I) standards are only just emerging. In order for such cyber-physical systems to fully realize their potential, they must be capable of exploiting one of the richest and most complex abilities of humans, which we take for granted: seeing and understanding the visual world.

Recent developments in nanotechnology and synthetic biology have enabled a new direction in biological engineering: synthesis of collective behaviors and spatio-temporal patterns in multi-cellular bacterial and mammalian systems. This will have a dramatic impact in such areas as amorphous computing, nano-fabrication, and, in particular, tissue engineering, where patterns can be used to differentiate stem cells into tissues and organs.

Recent developments in nanotechnology and synthetic biology have enabled a new direction in biological engineering: synthesis of collective behaviors and spatio-temporal patterns in multi-cellular bacterial and mammalian systems. This will have a dramatic impact in such areas as amorphous computing, nano-fabrication, and, in particular, tissue engineering, where patterns can be used to differentiate stem cells into tissues and organs.

This project represents a cross-disciplinary collaborative research effort on developing rigorous, closed-loop approaches for designing, simulating, and verifying medical devices. The work will open fundamental new approaches for radically accelerating the pace of medical device innovation, especially in the sphere of cardiac-device design. Specific attention will be devoted to developing advanced formal methods-based approaches for analyzing controller designs for safety and effectiveness; and devising methods for expediting regulatory and other third-party reviews of device designs.

1446582 (Shroff) and 1446478 (Hou). Buildings in the U.S. contribute to 39% of energy use, consume approximately 70% of the electricity, and account for 39% of CO2 emissions. Hence, developing green building architectures is an extremely critical component in energy sustainability. The investigators will develop a unified analytical approach for green building design that comprehensively manages energy sustainability by taking into account the complex interactions between these systems of systems, providing a high degree of security, agility and robust to extreme events.

Computer systems are increasingly coming to be relied upon to augment or replace human operators in controlling mechanical devices in contexts such as transportation systems, chemical plants, and medical devices, where safety and correctness are critical. A central problem is how to verify that such partially automated or fully autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) are worthy of our trust. One promising approach involves synthesis of the computer implementation codes from formal specifications, by software tools.