This project features conception, design, and deployment of a wireless network of embedded devices, for monitoring the behavior of animals in the wild.  The system is being deployed and tested in biologically relevant scenarios.

This project is focused on the fundamental research in establishing a foundational framework towards the development of an autonomous Cyber-Physical System (CPS) through distributed computation in a Networked Control Systems (NCS) paradigm. Specific attention is focused on an application where the computational, and communication challenges are unique due to the sheer dimensionality of the physical system. An example of such CPS is the smart power grid, which includes large-scale deployment of distributed and networked Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and wind energy resources.

Traffic control management strategies have been largely focused on improving vehicular traffic flows on highways and freeways but arterials have not been used properly and pedestrians are mostly ignored. New urban arterial designs encourage modal shifts which gives further impetus to devise novel traffic control strategies to more quickly respond to changing conditions and salient events, while balancing safety and efficiency for all users.

This project is to develop dynamical models of distributed computation systems that are resilient to noise, unreliable communication and other source uncertainty. The key idea is centered on the development of optimization systems. These are dynamical systems that (solve) stabilize around the optimal solution of a (static) convex optimization problem. If the optimization problem is separable, then the designed dynamic system decomposes into a set of locally interacting dynamic systems.

The objective of this project has been to apply the techniques developed for communications networks to collaborative, intelligent vehicles. The techniques are applied to a lane merge protocol that assists a driver who is merging between two vehicles in an adjacent lane. The previous work that has been reported on this project includes: a multiple stack, layered architecture; a strategy for using synchronized clocks; and the probabilistic verification of protocols. 

SCALE (Safe Community Awareness and Alerting) is a  Global Cities Challenge Project with  multiple deployments, the primary one being in  in Montgomery County, Maryland.  SCALE2 is a community government/academic/industry partnership effort that aims to deploy, actuate and evaluate techniques to support multiple heterogeneous IoT technologies in real world communities. Through SCALE, significant public benefits can be enabled in the areas of emergency preparedness/response at the individual and community scale.

AquaSCALE is a cyber-physical-human middleware for gathering, analyzing and adapting operations of increasingly failure-prone community water services. Today, detection of anomalous events in civil infrastructures (e.g. water pipe breaks and leaks) is time consuming and often takes hours or days. AquaSCALE leverages dynamic data from multiple information sources including IoT sensing data, geophysical data, human input, and simulation and modeling engines to accurately and quickly identify vulnerable spots in water networks.

How much should a person be allowed to interact with a controlled machine? If that machine is easily destabilized, and if the controller operating it is essential to its operation, the answer may be that the person should not be allowed any control authority at all. Using a combination of techniques coming from machine learning, optimal control, and formal verification, the proposed work focuses on a computable notion of trust that allows the embedded system to assess the safety of instruction.

This project is developing a formal methods approach to meet temporal logic specifications in traffic control. Formal methods offer efficient techniques for proving the correct operation of systems, such as computer programs and digital circuits, and for designing systems that are correct by construction. This project is bringing these powerful techniques to bear on traffic networks.