As Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) employing mobile nodes continue to integrate into the physical world, ensuring their safety and security become crucial goals. Due to their mobility, real-time, energy and safety constraints, coupled by their reliance on communication mediums that are subject to interference and intentional jamming, the projected complexities in Mobile CPSs will far exceed those of traditional computing systems. Such increase in complexity widens the malicious opportunities for adversaries and with many components interacting together, distinguishing between normal and abnormal behaviors becomes quite challenging. The research work in this project falls along two main thrusts: (1) identifying stealthy attacks and (2) developing defense mechanisms. Along the first thrust, a unifying theoretical framework is developed to uncover attacks in a systematic manner whereby an adversary solves Markovian Decision Processes problems to identify optimal and suboptimal attack policies. The effects of the attacks are assessed through different instantiations of damage and cost metrics. Along the second thrust, novel randomization controllers and randomization-aware anomaly detection mechanisms are developed to prevent, detect and mitigate stealthy attacks. The outcomes of this CAREER project will ultimately provide concrete foundations to build more secure systems in the areas of robotics, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems. The educational activities--as in curriculum development and hands-on laboratory experiences--will provide students with the essential skills to build dependable and trustworthy systems, while ensuring the participation of undergraduates, women and underrepresented minorities. The outreach activities will expose high school students to Computer Science education and scientific research.

The objective of this project is to incorporate educational modules related to the new computing paradigm, called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) into a number of computer science courses. CPS integrates computation and sensing into physical processes, producing a wealth of exciting applications in many domains of life. The proposed longevity-oriented approach of using several courses exposes students to these concepts over the long term from their freshman to senior years. Additionally, the modules address cross-cutting concerns such as fault-tolerance, scalability, software design and testing, resource constraints, and concurrency. This approach has the potential to prepare students for future careers in development of CPS applications, while attempting to address high freshmen attrition problems faced by computer science programs. The proposed modules allow students to develop socially-relevant applications early-on in their education and continue those practices throughout the curriculum with gradually increasing complexity. These approaches and modules specifically target the improvement of the quality of computer science education offered to academically underprepared students. This project aims to (1) develop an infrastructure suited for teaching CPSs that can be used as a best practice example in the construction of future laboratories at other institutions; (2) promote computer science education through the development of teaching modules that will be made publicly available, allowing adoption by other institutions; (3) provide students with opportunities to participate in research and development as they develop socially-relevant applications; and (4) use developed socially-relevant applications to recruit K-12 students into STEM programs.

Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is fundamental to cyber-physical systems for sensing, control, performance, and energy efficient integration of computing and communications. This statement underlies the proposal. Emerging CPS applications depend on precise knowledge of time to infer location and control communication. There is a diversity of semantics used to describe time, and quality of time varies as we move up and down the system stack. System designs tend to overcompensate for these uncertainties and the result is systems that may be over designed, inefficient, and fragile. The intellectual merit derives from the new and fundamental concept of time and the holistic measure of quality of time (QoT) that captures metrics including resolution, accuracy, and stability. The proposal builds a system stack ("ROSELINE") that enables new ways for clock hardware, operating system, network services, and applications to learn, maintain and exchange information about time, influence component behavior, and robustly adapt to dynamic QoT requirements, as well as to benign and adversarial changes in operating conditions. Application areas that will benefit from Quality of Time will include: smart grid, networked and coordinated control of aerospace systems, underwater sensing, and industrial automation. The broader impact of the proposal is due to the foundational nature of the work which builds a robust and tunable quality of time that can be applied across a broad spectrum of applications that pervade modern life. The proposal will also provide valuable opportunities to integrate research and education in graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 classrooms. There will be extensive outreach through publications, open sourcing of software, and participation in activities such as the Los Angeles Computing Circle for pre-college students.

This highly interdisciplinary research addresses two fundamental challenges in image sensing and image understanding: 1) versatile camera systems in a small form factor, and 2) 3-dimensional scene and object recognition from 2-dimensional photos. These fundamental challenges are tackled together by developing a cyber-physical imaging system, called smart flexible camera sheet, which integrates an array of many micro-cameras (millimeters in size each) onto a thin substrate. The substrate has flexible geometric shape and the orientation of each camera is individually adjusted and controlled in real time via intelligent algorithms. The overall imaging system is ultra-thin and space-efficient, and can be easily mounted onto or embedded into any planar or curved surface. Hence it opens up a plethora of new civilian and military applications where surveillance and visual monitoring are required, thus bearing great commercialization potential. Example applications are: smart vehicles, smart transportation, highway safety, smart civil infrastructure, manufacturing lines, battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance, sensor networks, mobile robotics, medical facilities, and patient care.