The confluence of two powerful global trends -- the rapid growth of cloud computing and data centers with skyrocketing energy consumption, and the accelerating penetration of renewable energy sources --

As self-driving cars are being introduced into road networks, the overall safety and efficiency of the resulting traffic system must be established and it must be guaranteed. This project develops methods to analyze and coordinate networks of fully and partially self-driving vehicles that interact with conventional human-driven vehicles on road grids. The outcomes of the research add to the understanding of more general systems with reconfigurable hierarchical structures and they help create designs with minimal computation and communication delay.

Many safety-critical cyber-physical systems rely on advanced sensing capabilities to react to chang- ing environmental conditions. However, cost-effective deployments of such capabilities have remained elusive. Such deployments will require software infrastructure that enables multiple sensor-processing streams to be multiplexed onto a common hardware platform at reasonable cost, as well as tools and methods for validating that required processing rates can be maintained.

Automation is being increasingly introduced into every man-made system. The thrust to achieve trustworthy autonomous systems, which can attain goals independently in the presence of significant uncertainties and for long periods of time without any human intervention, has always been enticing. Significant progress has been made in the avenues of both software and hardware for meeting these objectives. However, technological challenges still exist and particularly in terms of decision making under uncertainty.

This project combines Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and gigabit networks to address major health concerns due to air pollution. A wide range of health outcomes are 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 the total global deaths. A major component of this pollution is airborne particulate matter. Approximately 50 million Americans have allergic diseases.

Assistive machines such as robotic arms and powered wheelchairs promote independence and ability in those with severe motor impairments. As the field of assistive robotics progresses rapidly, these devices are becoming more capable and dextrous and as a result, higher dimensional and harder to control. The dimensionality mismatch between high-dimensional robots and low-dimensional control interfaces requires the control space to be partitioned into control modes. For full control of the robot the user switches between these partitions and this is known as mode switching.

Executable Medical Best Practice Guidance (EMBG) system is designed to prevent unjustified deviation from medical best practice guidance across a hospital network, consisting of rural hospitals, regional center hospital and ambulance service. Like a GPS-enabled navigation system, EMBG provides patient state by state treatment advises based on dynamic patients’ conditions and clinical environment. The safety of the EMBG system is built upon formal theoretical verifications and clinical validations in collaboration with medical professionals.