The goal of this project is to develop a semantic foundation, cross-layer system architecture and adaptation services to improve dependability in instrumented cyberphysical spaces (ICPS) based on the principles of "computation reflection". ICPSs integrate a variety of sensing devices to create a digital representation of the evolving physical world and its processes for use by applications such as critical infrastructure monitoring, surveillance and incident-site emergency response. This requires the underlying systems to be dependable despite disruptions caused by failures in sensing, communications, and computation. The digital state representation guides a range of adaptations at different layers of the ICPS (i.e. networking, sensing, applications, cross-layer) to achieve end-to-end dependability at both the infrastructure and information levels. Examples of techniques explored include mechanisms for reliable information delivery over multi-networks, quality aware data collection, semantic sensing and reconfiguration using overlapping capabilities of heterogeneous sensors. Such adaptations are driven by a formal-methods based runtime analysis of system components, resource availability and application dependability needs. Responsphere, a real-world ICPS infrastructure on the University of California at Irvine campus, will serve as a testbed for development and validation of the overall ?reflective? approach and the cross-layer adaptation techniques to achieve dependability. Students at different levels (graduate, undergraduate, K-12) will be given opportunities to gain experience with using and designing real-world applications in the Responsphere ICPS via courses, independent study projects and demonstration sessions. Students will benefit tremendously from exposure to new software development paradigms for the ICPSs that will be a part of the future living environments.

This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project is developing technology for ubiquitous event reporting and data gathering on the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its ecological impacts. Traditional applications for monitoring disasters have relied on specialized, tightly-coupled, and expensive hardware and software platforms to capture, aggregate, and disseminate information on affected areas. We lack science and technology for rapid and dependable integration of computing and communication technology into natural and engineered physical systems, cyber-physical systems (CPS). The tragic Gulf oil spill of 2010 presents both a compelling need to fill this gap in research and a critical opportunity to help in relief efforts by deploying cutting-edge CPS research in the field. In particular, this CPS research is developing a cloud-supported mobile CPS application enabling community members to contribute as citizen scientists through sensor deployments and direct recording of events and ecological impacts of the Gulf oil spill, such as fish and bird kills. The project exploits the availability of smartphones (with sophisticated sensor packages, high-level programming APIs, and multiple network connectivity options) and cloud computing infrastructures that enable collecting and aggregating data from mobile applications. The goal is to develop a scientific basis for managing the quality-of-service (QoS), user coordination, sensor data dissemination, and validation issues that arise in mobile CPS disaster monitoring applications. The research will have many important broader impacts related to the Gulf oil spill disaster relief efforts, including providing help for the affected Gulf communities as they field and evaluate next-generation CPS research and build a sustained capability for capturing large snapshots of the ecological impact of the Gulf oil spill. The resulting environmental data will have lasting value for evaluating the consequences of the spill in multiple research fields, but especially in Marine Biology. The project is collaborating with Gulf area K-12 schools to integrate disaster and ecology monitoring activities into their curricula. The technologies developed (resource optimization techniques, data reporting protocol trade-off analysis, and empirical evaluation of social network coordination strategies for an open data environment) will provide a resource for the CPS research community. It is expected that project results will enable future efforts to create and validate CPS disaster response systems that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users and operate effectively in life-critical situations with scarce network and computing resources.

This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project is developing technology for ubiquitous event reporting and data gathering on the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its ecological impacts. Traditional applications for monitoring disasters have relied on specialized, tightly-coupled, and expensive hardware and software platforms to capture, aggregate, and disseminate information on affected areas. We lack science and technology for rapid and dependable integration of computing and communication technology into natural and engineered physical systems, cyber-physical systems (CPS). The tragic Gulf oil spill of 2010 presents both a compelling need to fill this gap in research and a critical opportunity to help in relief efforts by deploying cutting-edge CPS research in the field. In particular, this CPS research is developing a cloud-supported mobile CPS application enabling community members to contribute as citizen scientists through sensor deployments and direct recording of events and ecological impacts of the Gulf oil spill, such as fish and bird kills. The project exploits the availability of smartphones (with sophisticated sensor packages, high-level programming APIs, and multiple network connectivity options) and cloud computing infrastructures that enable collecting and aggregating data from mobile applications. The goal is to develop a scientific basis for managing the quality-of-service (QoS), user coordination, sensor data dissemination, and validation issues that arise in mobile CPS disaster monitoring applications. The research will have many important broader impacts related to the Gulf oil spill disaster relief efforts, including providing help for the affected Gulf communities as they field and evaluate next-generation CPS research and build a sustained capability for capturing large snapshots of the ecological impact of the Gulf oil spill. The resulting environmental data will have lasting value for evaluating the consequences of the spill in multiple research fields, but especially in Marine Biology. The project is collaborating with Gulf area K-12 schools to integrate disaster and ecology monitoring activities into their curricula. The technologies developed (resource optimization techniques, data reporting protocol trade-off analysis, and empirical evaluation of social network coordination strategies for an open data environment) will provide a resource for the CPS research community. It is expected that project results will enable future efforts to create and validate CPS disaster response systems that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users and operate effectively in life-critical situations with scarce network and computing resources.

This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project is developing technology for ubiquitous event reporting and data gathering on the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its ecological impacts. Traditional applications for monitoring disasters have relied on specialized, tightly-coupled, and expensive hardware and software platforms to capture, aggregate, and disseminate information on affected areas. We lack science and technology for rapid and dependable integration of computing and communication technology into natural and engineered physical systems, cyber-physical systems (CPS). The tragic Gulf oil spill of 2010 presents both a compelling need to fill this gap in research and a critical opportunity to help in relief efforts by deploying cutting-edge CPS research in the field. In particular, this CPS research is developing a cloud-supported mobile CPS application enabling community members to contribute as citizen scientists through sensor deployments and direct recording of events and ecological impacts of the Gulf oil spill, such as fish and bird kills. The project exploits the availability of smartphones (with sophisticated sensor packages, high-level programming APIs, and multiple network connectivity options) and cloud computing infrastructures that enable collecting and aggregating data from mobile applications. The goal is to develop a scientific basis for managing the quality-of-service (QoS), user coordination, sensor data dissemination, and validation issues that arise in mobile CPS disaster monitoring applications. The research will have many important broader impacts related to the Gulf oil spill disaster relief efforts, including providing help for the affected Gulf communities as they field and evaluate next-generation CPS research and build a sustained capability for capturing large snapshots of the ecological impact of the Gulf oil spill. The resulting environmental data will have lasting value for evaluating the consequences of the spill in multiple research fields, but especially in Marine Biology. The project is collaborating with Gulf area K-12 schools to integrate disaster and ecology monitoring activities into their curricula. The technologies developed (resource optimization techniques, data reporting protocol trade-off analysis, and empirical evaluation of social network coordination strategies for an open data environment) will provide a resource for the CPS research community. It is expected that project results will enable future efforts to create and validate CPS disaster response systems that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users and operate effectively in life-critical situations with scarce network and computing resources.

The objective of this research is to develop methods and tools for a multimodal and multi-sensor assessment and rehabilitation game system called CPLAY for children with Cerebral Palsy (CP). CPLAY collects and processes multiple types of stimulation and performance data while a child is playing. Its core has a touch-screen programmable game that has various metrics to measure delay of response, score, stamina/duration, accuracy of motor/hand motion. Optional devices attached to extend CPLAY versions provide additional parallel measurements of level of concentration/participation/engagement that quantify rehabilitation activity. The approach is to model the process as a cyber-physical system (CPS) feedback loop whereby data collected from various physical 3D devices (including fNIR brain imaging) are processed into hierarchical events of low-to-high semantic meaning that impact/ adjust treatment decisions. Intellectual Merit: The project will produce groundbreaking algorithms for event identification with a multi-level data to knowledge feedback loop approach. New machine learning, computer vision, data mining, multimodal data fusion, device integration and event-driven algorithms will lead towards a new type of cyber- physical rehabilitation science for neurological disorders. It will deliver fundamental advancements to engineering by showing how to integrate physical devices with a computationally quantitative platform for motor and cognitive skills assessment. Broader Impacts: The project delivers a modular & expandable game system that has huge implications on the future of US healthcare and rehabilitation of chronic neurological disabilities. It brings hope to children with Cerebral Palsy via lower cost and remote rehabilitation alternatives. It brings new directions to human centered computing for intelligent decision-making that supplements evidence-based practices and addresses social and psychological isolation problems.

The objective of this research is to understand the loosely coupled networked control systems and to address the scientific and technological challenges that arise in their development and operation. The approach is to (1) develop a mathematical abstraction of the CPS, and an online actuation decision model that takes into account temporal and spatial dependencies among actions; (2) develop algorithms and policies to effectively manage the system and optimize its performance with respect to applications' QoS requirements; and (3) develop an agent-based event-driven framework to facilitate engineers easily monitor, (re)configure and control the system to achieve optimized results. The developed methodologies, algorithms, protocols and frameworks will be evaluated on testbeds and by our collaborating institution. The project provides fundamental understanding of loosely coupled networked control systems and a set of strategies in managing such systems. The components developed under this project enables the use of wireless-sensor-actuator networks for control systems found in a variety of disciplines and benefits waterway systems, air/ground transportation systems, power grid transmission systems, and the sort. The impact of this project is broadened through collaborations with our collaborating institution. This project provides a set of strategies and tools to help them meet the new standards. The inter-disciplinary labs and curriculum development at both undergraduate and graduate level with an emphasis on CPS interdisciplinary applications, theoretical foundations, and CPS implementations prepare our students as future workforce in the area of CPS applications.

The objective of this research is the creation of a coastal observing system that enables dense, in situ, 4D sensing through networked, sensor-equipped underwater drifters. The approach is to develop the technologies required to deploy a swarm of autonomous buoyancy controlled drifters, which are vehicles that can control their depth, but are otherwise carried entirely by the ocean currents. Such Lagrangian sampling promises to deliver a wealth of new data, ranging from applications in physical oceanography (mapping 3D currents), biology (observing the dispersion of larvae and nutrients), environmental science (tracking coastal pollutants and effluents from storm drains), and security (monitoring harbors and ports). This observing system fundamentally requires accurate positions of the drifters (to interpret the spatial correlations of data samples), swarm control algorithms (to achieve desired sampling topologies), and wireless communication (to coordinate between the individual drifters). This research will create distributed techniques to self-localize the drifter swarm, novel swarm control algorithms that enable topology manipulation while purely leveraging the stratified flow environment, and efficient wireless underwater communication for information sharing. This project has significant societal impact and educational elements. Underwater drifter swarms will enable novel insights into a wide array of scientific questions, including understanding plankton transport, accumulation and dispersion as well as monitoring harmful algal blooms. Undergraduates will play an active role in many aspects of this project, thereby offering them a uniquely interdisciplinary experience. Finally, outreach to high school students will occur through the UCSD COSMOS summer program.

The objective of this research is to develop advanced distributed monitoring and control systems for civil infrastructure. The approach uses a cyber-physical co-design of wireless sensor-actuator networks and structural monitoring and control algorithms. The unified cyber-physical system architecture and abstractions employ reusable middleware services to develop hierarchical structural monitoring and control systems. The intellectual merit of this multi-disciplinary research includes (1) a unified middleware architecture and abstractions for hierarchical sensing and control; (2) a reusable middleware service library for hierarchical structural monitoring and control; (3) customizable time synchronization and synchronized sensing routines; (4) a holistic energy management scheme that maps structural monitoring and control onto a distributed wireless sensor-actuator architecture; (5) dynamic sensor and actuator activation strategies to optimize for the requirements of monitoring, computing, and control; and (6) deployment and empirical validation of structural health monitoring and control systems on representative lab structures and in-service multi-span bridges. While the system constitutes a case study, it will enable the development of general principles that would be applicable to a broad range of engineering cyber-physical systems. This research will result in a reduction in the lifecycle costs and risks related to our civil infrastructure. The multi-disciplinary team will disseminate results throughout the international research community through open-source software and sensor board hardware. Education and outreach activities will be held in conjunction with the Asia-Pacific Summer School in Smart Structures Technology jointly hosted by the US, Japan, China, and Korea.

This project has two closely related objectives. The first is to design and evaluate new Cyber Transportation Systems (CTS) applications for improved traffic safety and traffic operations. The second is to design and develop an integrated traffic-driving-networking simulator. The project takes a multi-disciplinary approach that combines cyber technologies, transportation engineering and human factors. While transportation serves indispensible functions to society, it does have its own negative impacts in terms of accidents, congestion, pollution, and energy consumption. To improve traffic safety, the project will develop and evaluate novel algorithms and protocols for prioritization, delivery and fusion of various warning messages so as to reduce drivers? response time and workload, prevent conflicting warnings, and minimize false alarms. To improve traffic operations, the project will focus on the design of next generation traffic management and control algorithms for both normal and emergency operations (e.g. during inclement weather and evacuation scenarios). Both human performance modeling methods and human subjects? experimental methods will be used to address the human element in this research. As the design and evaluation of CTS applications requires an effective development and testing platform linking the human, transportation and cyber elements, the project will also design and develop a simulator that combines the main features of a traffic simulator, a networking simulator and a driving simulator. The integrated simulator will allow a human driver to control a subject vehicle in a virtual environment with realistic background traffic, which is capable of communicating with the driver and other vehicles with CTS messages. Background traffic will be controlled by a realistic driver model based on our human factors research that accounts for CTS messages? impact on driver behavior. Intellectual Merits: The project explicitly considers human factors in the design and evaluation of CTS safety and operations applications, a topic which has not received adequate attention. Moreover, the proposed integrated simulator represents a first-of-a-kind simulator with unique features that can reduce the design and evaluation costs of new CTS applications. Broader Impacts: The proposed research can improve the safety, efficiency and environmental-friendless of transportation systems, which serve as the very foundation of modern societies and directly affects the quality of life. The integrated simulator will be used as a tool for teenage and elderly driver education and training, and to inspire minority, middle and high school students to pursue careers in math, science, and computer-related fields

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.