The objective of this research is to address a fundamental question in cyber-physical systems: What is the ideal structure of systems that detect critical events such as earthquakes by using data from large numbers of sensors held and managed by ordinary people in the community? The approach is to develop theory about widely-distributed sense and respond systems, using dynamic and possibly unreliable networks using sensors and responders installed and managed by ordinary citizens, and to apply the theory to problems important to society, such as responding to earthquakes. Intellectual Merit: This research develops theory and prototype implementations of community-based sense-and-respond systems that enable people help one another in societal crises. The number of participants in such systems may change rapidly; some participants may be unreliable and some may even deliberately attack systems; and the structures of networks change as crises unfold. Such systems must function in rare critical situations; so designs, analyses and tests of these systems must give confidence that they will function when the crisis hits. The proposed research will show how to design systems with organic growth, unreliable components and connections, security against rogue components, and methods of demonstrating reliability. Broader Impact: People want to help one another in a crisis. Cheap sensors, mobile phones, and laptops enable people to use information technology to help. This research empowers ordinary citizens collaborate to overcome crises. The researchers collaborate with the US Geological Service, Southern California Edison, and Microsoft, and will host 3,000 students at a seismic facility

The goal of this project is to develop a novel cyber-physical system (CPS) for performing multimodal image-guided robot-assisted minimally invasive surgeries (MIS). The approach is based on: (1) novel quantitative analysis of multi-contrast data, (2) control that uses this information to maneuver conformable robotic manipulators, while adjusting on-the-fly scanning parameters to acquire additional information, and (3) human-information/machine-interfacing for comprehensive appreciation of the physical environment. The intellectual merit arises from the development of: (1) a CPS that relies on "real" and "real-time" data, minimizing parametric and abstracted assumptions, extracts and matures information from a dynamic physical system (patient and robot) by combining management of data collection (at the physical sensor site) and data analysis (at the cyber site), (2) "smart sensing", to control data acquisition based on disruptive or situation altering events, (3) control coordination by interlacing sensing, control and perception, and the incorporation of steerable tools. The societal impact arises from contributions to a leap in MIS: from "keyhole" visualization (i.e., laparoscopy) to in-situ real-time image guidance, thereby enabling a wider range of MIS. This will directly benefit patients and their families (faster recovery/reduced trauma). Economic impact arises from the cost-effectiveness of MIS to the health care system, faster patient return to the workplace, and technology commercialization. The project will integrate research and education, diversity and outreach, by enhancing current and introducing new research-intensive courses in Cyber-physical Systems, Medical Imaging and Medical Robotics, and dissemination via trans-institutional collaborations, a comprehensive web site, multimedia web-seminars, and distribution to high schools.

The objective of this research is to develop an intuitive user interface for functional electrical stimulation (FES), which uses surgically-implanted electrodes to stimulate muscles in spinal cord-injured (SCI) patients. The challenge is to enable high-level tetraplegic patients to regain the use of their own arm. The approach is to develop a multi-modal Bayesian user-intent decoder; use natural muscle synergies to generate appropriate low-dimensional muscle activation signals in a feedforward controller; develop a feedback controller to enhance the performance of the feedforward controller; and test the system with SCI patients on daily living tasks, such as reaching, grasping, and eating. The challenge problem of restoring arm use to SCI patients will lead to new design principles for cyber-physical systems interfacing neural and biological systems with engineered computation and electrical power systems. The tight integration of the proposed user interface and controller with the users own control system requires a deep understanding of biological design principles such as nested feedback loops at different time and length scales, noisy signals, parallel processing, and highly coupled neuromechanical systems. This work will lead to new technology that dramatically improves the lives of spinal cord-injured patients. These patients often have no cognitive impairment and have long life spans after injury. The goal is to enable these patients to eat, reach, and grasp nearby objects. These tasks are critical for independent living and quality of life. This work will also help train a new generation of students in human-machine interfaces at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels.

The objective of this research is to understand mechanisms for generating natural movements of skeletal mechanisms driven by stochastically-controlled, biologically-inspired actuators. The approach is to verify the hypothesis that the variability associated with high redundancy and the stochastic nature of the actuation is key to generating natural movements. This project seeks to: (i) develop a method to model and characterize actuator array topologies; (ii) develop a method to analyze the force variability of stochastic actuator arrays; (iii) develop an analytical method to generate movements for a robot with multiple degrees of freedom by minimizing the effect of variability; and (iv) demonstrate the validity of the approach through the development of a robotic arm driven by multiple stochastic array actuators. With respect to intellectual merit, the study of inhomogeneous stochastic actuator network topologies inspired by neuromuscular systems could find the "missing links" that bridge the gap between biological natural movements and the ones in artificial systems. Potential results could impact other research areas, including robust computer networks, robust immune systems, and redundant muscle coordination. With respect to broader impacts, a new graduate-level course provides students in engineering and science with a comprehensive and multidisciplinary education in the underlying principles, cutting-edge applications, and societal impacts of biologically-inspired robotics. Outreach activities include an interactive educational program for K-12 students and a workshop for high-school students and their mentors on robot development. International collaboration with Tokyo University of Science, Japan, will be initiated.

Proposal Title: CPS:Medium:Collaborative Research: The Foundations of Implicit and Explicit Communication in Cyberphysical Systems Institution: University of California-Berkeley Abstract Date: 07/30/09 The objective of this research is to develop the theoretical foundations for understanding implicit and explicit communication within cyber-physical systems. The approach is two-fold: (a) developing new information-theoretic tools to reveal the essential nature of implicit communication in a manner analogous to (and compatible with) classical network information theory; (b) viewing the wireless ecosystem itself as a cyber-physical system in which spectrum is the physical substrate that is manipulated by heterogeneous interacting cyber-systems that must be certified to meet safety and performance objectives. The intellectual merit of this project comes from the transformative technical approaches being developed. The key to understanding implicit communication is a conceptual breakthrough in attacking the unsolved 40-year-old Witsenhausen counterexample by using an approximate-optimality paradigm combined with new ideas from sphere-packing and cognitive radio channels. These techniques open up radically new mathematical avenues to attack distributed-control problems that have long been considered fundamentally intractable. They guide the development of nonlinear control strategies that are provably orders-of-magnitude better than the best linear strategies. The keys to understanding explicit communication in cyber-physical systems are new approaches to active learning, detection, and estimation in distributed environments that combine worst-case and probabilistic elements. Beyond the many diverse applications (the Internet, the smart grid, intelligent transportation, etc.) of heterogeneous cyber-physical systems themselves, this research reaches out to wireless policy: allowing the principled formulation of government regulations for next-generation networks. Graduate students (including female ones) and postdoctoral scholars will be trained and research results incorporated into both the undergraduate and graduate curricula. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION Proposal Abstract Proposal:0932410 PI Name:Sahai, Anant Printed from

The objective of this research is to develop non-volatile computing devices, which allow the power source to be cut off at any time, and yet resume regular operation without loss of information when the power comes back. The approach is to replace all critical memory components with non-volatile units so that computing state is maintained over power interruptions. The advancement in new Flash memory devices makes this approach feasible by enabling low-voltage program/erase (P/E) around ±2V and a long (projected >1016) cycling endurance to be integrated into CMOS technology. This research effort seeks to establish a new paradigm of computing where non-volatile memory units are used pervasively to enhance reliability against power source instability, energy-efficiency, and security. The non-volatile computing devices are especially useful for embedded cyber-physical systems enabling long running computations and data collection even with unreliable power sources. The technologies developed from this project can also benefit conventional architecture in its power optimization and internal security code generation. The project is a close collaboration between computer architecture and CMOS technology development groups, where all levels in the design hierarchy will be visited for system and technology evaluation. This project integrates its research efforts with education by developing an undergraduate and Master curriculum that spans over the vertical design hierarchy in microprocessors. This vertical education will better prepare future work force in tackling tremendous design challenges spanning many layers of microprocessors. The results from this project will be made widely available to both industry and academia.

The objective of this research is to investigate and implement a software architecture to improve productivity in the development of rapidly deployable, robust, real-time situational awareness and response applications. The approach is based on a modular cross-layered architecture that combines a data-centric descriptive programming model with an overlay-based communication model. The cross-layer architecture will promote an efficient implementation. Simultaneously, the data-centric programming model and overlay-based communication model will promote a robust implementation that can take advantage of heterogeneous resources and respond to different failures. There is currently no high-level software architecture that meets the stringent requirements of many situational awareness and response applications. The proposed project will fill this void by developing a novel data-centric programming model that spans devices with varying computational and communication capabilities. Similarly, the overlay communication model will extend existing work by integrating network resources with the programming model. This cross-layer design will promote the implementation of efficient and robust applications. This research will benefit society by providing emergency responders with software tools that present key information in a timely fashion. This, in turn, will increase safety and reduce economic and human loss during emergencies. The productivity gains in deploying sensors and mobile devices will benefit other domains, such as field research using sensor networks. Software will be released under an open-source license to promote the use by government agencies, research institutions, and individuals. Products of this research, including the software, will be used in courses at the University of North Carolina.

The objective of this research is to develop numerical techniques for solving partial differential equations (PDE) that govern information flow in dense wireless networks. Despite the analogy of information flow in these networks to physical phenomena such as thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, many physical and protocol imposed constraints make information flow PDEs unique and different from the observed PDEs in physical phenomena. The approach is to develop a systematic method where a unified framework is capable of optimizing a broad class of objective functions on the information flow in a network of a massive number of nodes. The objective function is defined depending on desired property of the geometric paths of information. This leads to PDEs whose form varies depending on the optimization objective. Finally, numerical techniques will be developed to solve the PDEs in a network setting and in a distributed manner. The intellectual merits of this project are: developing mathematical tools that address a broad range of design objectives in large scale wireless sensor networks under a unified framework; initiating a new field on numerical analysis of information flow in dense wireless networks; and developing design tools for networking problems such as transport capacity, routing, and load balancing. The broader impacts of this research are: helping the development of next generation wireless networks; encouraging involvement of undergraduate students and underrepresented groups, and incorporating the research results into graduate level courses. Additionally, the research is interdisciplinary, bringing together sensor networking, theoretical physics, partial differential equations, and numerical optimization.

The objective of this research is to bring high levels of system reliability and integrity to application domains that cannot afford the cost, power, weight, and size associated with physical redundancy. The approach is to develop complementary monitoring algorithms and novel computing architectures that enable the detection of faults. In particular, there is a significant opportunity to reduce the reliance on physical redundancy by combining model-based and data-driven monitoring techniques. Implementing this approach to fault detection would be difficult with existing software and computing architectures. This motivates the development of a general purpose monitoring framework through monitoring-aware compilers coupled with enhancements to multi-core architectures. The intellectual merit of the project is twofold. First, it has the potential to lead to a novel fault detection approach that blends complementary monitoring algorithms. Second, advances in multi-core processors are leveraged to enable implementation of these fault detection approaches. This addresses key themes in cyber-physical systems by investigating the fundamental issue of fault detection for physical systems and by developing a generic processor architecture for monitoring. With respect to broader impact, project offers the potential for positive influences on industrial practice and education. If successful, the design ideas from this project can be incorporated into low-cost multi-core architectures suitable for embedded systems. The potentially transformative performance improvement offered by this framework could also impact current research in run-time verification and on-line monitoring. The research is to be incorporated into the course "Design, Build, Simulate, Test and Fly Small Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles" for senior undergraduate and first-year graduate students.

The objective of this research is to develop energy-efficient integrity establishment techniques for dynamic networks of cyber physical devices. In such dynamic networks, devices connect opportunistically and perform general-purpose computations on behalf of other devices. However, some devices may be malicious in intent and affect the integrity of computation. The approach is to develop new trust establishment mechanisms for dynamic networks. Existing trusted computing mechanisms are not directly applicable to cyber physical devices because they are resource-intensive and require devices to have special-purpose hardware. This project is addressing these problems along three research prongs. The first is a comprehensive study of the resource bottlenecks in current trust establishment protocols. Second, the insights from this study are being used to develop resource-aware attestation protocols for cyber physical devices that are equipped with trusted hardware. Third, the project is developing new trust establishment protocols for cyber physical devices that may lack trusted hardware. A key outcome of the project is an improved understanding of the tradeoffs needed to balance the concerns of security and resource-awareness in dynamic networks. Dynamic networks allow cyber physical devices to form a highly-distributed, cloud-like infrastructure for computations involving the physical world. The trust-establishment mechanisms developed in this project encourage devices to participate in dynamic networks, thereby unleashing the full potential of dynamic networks. This project includes development of dynamic networking applications, such as distributed gaming and social networking, in undergraduate curricula and course projects, thereby fostering the participation of this key demographic.