The objective of this research is to develop methods for the operation and design of cyber physical systems in general, and energy efficient buildings in particular. The approach is to use an integrated framework: create models of complex systems from data; then design the associated sensing-communication-computation-control system; and finally create distributed estimation and control algorithms, along with execution platforms to implement these algorithms. A special emphasis is placed on adaptation. In particular, buildings and their environments change with time, as does the way in which buildings are used. The system must be designed to detect and respond to such changes. The proposed research brings together ideas from control theory, dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and embedded systems to address design and operation of complex cyber physical systems that were previously thought to be intractable. These approaches provide qualitative understanding of system behavior, algorithms for control, and their implementation in a networked execution platform. Insights gained by the application of model reduction and adaptation techniques will lead to significant developments in the underlying theory of modeling and control of complex systems. The research is expected to directly impact US industry through the development of integrated software-hardware solutions for smart buildings. Collaborations with United Technologies Research Center are planned to enhance this impact. The techniques developed are expected to apply to other complex cyber-physical systems with uncertain dynamics, such as the electric power grid. The project will enhance engineering education through the introduction of cross-disciplinary courses.

Effective response and adaptation to the physical world, and rigorous management of such behaviors through programmable computational means, are mandatory features of cyber physical systems (CPS). However, achieving such capabilities across diverse application requirements surpasses the current state of the art in system platforms and tools. Current computational platforms and tools often treat physical properties individually and in isolation from other cyber and physical attributes. They do not adequately support the expression, integration, and enforcement of system properties that span cyber and physical domains. This results in inefficient use of both cyber and physical resources, and in lower system effectiveness overall. This work investigates novel approaches to these important problems, based on modularizing and integrating diverse cyber-physical concerns that cross-cut physical, hardware, instruction set, kernel, library, and application abstractions. The three major thrusts of this research are 1) establishing foundational models for expressing, analyzing, enforcing, and measuring different conjoined cyber-physical properties, 2) conducting a fundamental re-examination of system development tools and platforms to identify how different application concerns that cut across them can be modularized as cyber-physical system aspects, and 3) developing prototype demonstrations of our results to evaluate further those advances in the state of the art in aspect-oriented techniques for CPS, to help assess the feasibility of broader application of the approach. The broader impact of this work will be through dissemination of academic papers, and open platforms and tools that afford unprecedented integration of cyber-physical properties.

The objective of this research is to develop new principles and techniques for adaptive operation in highly dynamic physical environments, using miniaturized, energy-constrained devices. The approach is to use holistic cross-layer solutions that simultaneously address all aspects of the system, from low-level hardware design to higher-level communication and data fusion algorithms to top-level applications. In particular, this work focuses on body area sensor networks as emerging cyber-physical systems. The intellectual merit includes producing new principles regarding how cyber systems must be designed in order to continually adapt and respond to rapidly changing physical environments, sensed data, and application contexts in an energy-efficient manner. New cross-layer technologies will be created that use a holistic bottom-up and top-down design -- from silicon to user and back again. A novel system-on-a-chip hardware platform will be designed and fabricated using three cutting-edge technologies to reduce the cost of communication and computation by several orders of magnitude. The broad impact of this project will enable the wide range of applications and societal benefits promised by body area networks, including improving the quality and reducing the costs of healthcare. The technology will have broad implications for any cyber physical system that uses energy constrained wireless devices. A new seminar series will bring together experts from many fields (including domain experts, such as physicians and healthcare professionals). The key aspects of this work that deal with healthcare have the potential to attract women and minorities to the computer field.

The objective of this research is to establish a new development paradigm that enables the effective design, implementation, and certification of medical device cyber-physical systems. The approach is to pursue the following research directions: 1) to support medical device interconnectivity and interoperability with network-enabled control; 2) to apply coordination between medical devices to support emerging clinical scenarios; 3) to ?close the loop? and enable feedback about the condition of the patient to the devices delivering therapy; and 4) to assure safety and effectiveness of interoperating medical devices. The intellectual merits of the project are 1) foundations for rigorous development, which include formalization of clinical scenarios, operational procedures, and architectures of medical device systems, as well as patient and caregiver modeling; 2) high-confidence software development for medical device systems that includes the safe and effective composition of clinical scenarios and devices into a dynamically assembled system; 3) validation and certification of medical device cyber-physical systems; and 4) education of the next-generation of medical device system developers who must be literate in both computational and physical aspects of devices. The broader impacts of the project will be achieved in three ways. Novel design methods and certification techniques will significantly improve patient safety. The introduction of closed-loop scenarios into clinical practice will reduce the burden that caregivers are currently facing and will have the potential of reducing the overall costs of health care. Finally, the educational efforts and outreach activities will increase awareness of careers in the area of medical device systems and help attract women and under-represented minorities to the field.

Tens of thousands of the nation?s bridges are structurally deficient. This project proposes to design a self sustaining, wireless structural monitoring system. The novel low-power Flash FPGA-based hardware platform and the corresponding software architecture offer a radically new approach to CPS design. A soft multi-core platform where software modules that run in parallel will be guaranteed to have dedicated single-threaded soft processor cores enables flexible power management by running only the necessary cores at any given time at the slowest clock rate mandated by the observed/controlled physical phenomena. As bridges tend to vibrate due to wind and dynamic load conditions, we are developing a novel vibration-based energy harvesting device that is capable of automatically adjusting its resonant response in order to capture much more energy than the current techniques can. Moreover, the PIs are developing structural health assessment techniques involving quantitative analysis of signals to determine crack type, location and size. The technology will indicate structural problems before they become critical potentially saving human lives and averting late and extensive repairs. The impact of the vibration harvesting technique and the soft multi-core architecture will go beyond structural monitoring. A separate soft core dedicated to each software component that interacts with the physical world will make CPS more responsive while saving power at the same time. The education plan focuses on outreach toward underrepresented minorities by recruiting such undergraduates to participate in the research. To facilitate the dissemination of our results, all hardware designs and software developed under this project will be open source.

The objective of this research is the development of methods and software that will allow robots to detect and localize objects using Active Vision and develop descriptions of their visual appearance in terms of shape primitives. The approach is bio inspired and consists of three novel components. First, the robot will actively search the space of interest using an attention mechanism consisting of filters tuned to the appearance of objects. Second, an anthropomorphic segmentation mechanism will be used. The robot will fixate at a point within the attended area and segment the surface containing the fixation point, using contours and depth information from motion and stereo. Finally, a description of the segmented object, in terms of the contours of its visible surfaces and a qualitative description of their 3D shape will be developed. The intellectual merit of the proposed approach comes from the bio-inspired design and the interaction of visual learning with advanced behavior. The availability of filters will allow the triggering of contextual models that work in a top-down fashion meeting at some point the bottom-up low-level processes. Thus, the approach defines, for the first time, the meeting point where perception happens. The broader impacts of the proposed effort stem from the general usability of the proposed components. Adding top-down attention and segmentation capabilities to robots that can navigate and manipulate, will enable many technologies, for example household robots or assistive robots for the care of the elders, or robots in manufacturing, space exploration and education.

The objective of this research is to enable cyberphysical systems (CPS) to be context-aware of people in the environment and to use data from real-world probabilistic sensors. The approach is (1) to use radio tomography (RT) and RFID to provide awareness (location and potential identification) of every person in a building or area, and (2) to develop new middleware tools to enable context-aware computing systems to use probabilistic data, thus allowing new applications to exploit sometimes unreliable estimates of the environment.The intellectual merit of the proposal is in the development of new algorithms and models for building-scale RT with low radio densities and across multiple frequencies; the development of efficient multichannel access protocols for rapid and adaptive peer-to-peer measurements; the development of space-time and probabilistic data representations for use in stream-based context awareness systems and for merging ID and non-ID data; (4) and the development of a human context-aware software development toolkit that interfaces between probabilistic data and context-aware applications. The proposal impacts broadly the area of Cyberphysical systems that reason about human presence and rely on noisy and potentially ambiguous (practical) sensors. The research has additional dramatic impact in: (1) smart facilities which automatically enforce safety, privacy, and security procedures, increasing the ability to respond in emergency situations and prevent accidents and sabotage; (2) elder care, to monitor for physical or social decline so that effective intervention can be implemented, extending the period elders can live in their own home, without pervasive video surveillance.

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.