Fire Departments including CALFIRE used to have look-out towers in forests. However look-out towers are costly to maintain. Our project aims to empower ordinary citizens to take charge in collecting real time environmental data that can be used to serve a common interest. Volunteers can be part of a CPS. They can use their smart phones to take picture of a wildfire and upload it to a server. Each volunteer will be a node of the CPS.  The server is responsible for collecting and processing information in the defined coverage area. The coverage area will be divided into coverage grids.

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 --

This project aims to empower ordinary citizens to take charge in collecting real time environmental data that can be used to serve a common interest. The target application of the project is a cyber-physical system for detecting small amounts of explosive vapor in the air so as to protect large-area public gatherings. In this system, extremely low-cost explosive sensors, handed out free of charge, will be connected to the smart phones of the willing participants, effectively turning each one of them into a look-out sensor node.

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.

When dealing with safety-critical programmed molecular systems, it is essential to be able to observe the behavior of a system. The capability to  log the states of a system over time, for later observation, is critical to help determine when and how faults have occurred.

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.

To reduce reliance on other countries for minerals (e.g., coal, rare-earth metals), the USA has seen an invigoration of mining activity in recent years. Unfortunately, miners often have to work in dangerous environments where there is risk of mine explosions, fires, poisonous gases, and flooding in tunnels. Mine accidents have killed over 500 US and 40,000 mine workers worldwide in the past decade.