Overview: Current animal farming practice relies on discrete individual sensors to monitor animal health and farm efficiency, however, no cyber-physical systems (CPS) or closed-loop methodologies exist to monitor and control the efficiency of individual animals within a herd or the entire herd in real-time. We believe this limits the production efficiency and opens the possibility of accidental health hazards.

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) integrate computing, network communication, and control to facilitate smart-world systems. Nonetheless, the interconnection of sensing and actuating devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) creates new uncertainties and countermeasures must be developed. Deep Learning is an emerging tool with the power to conduct data analysis to address uncertainties.

Our buildings are broken. Each year we spend over $400B to power, heat and cool our buildings. Moreover, buildings are the largest source of environmental emissions in the US. As a result, even a modest improvement in energy efficiency of the nation’s building stock would result in substantial economic and environmental benefits. In this project, we focus on driving energy efficiency in commercial buildings because this sector represents a substantial portion of the energy usage and costs within the overall building sector.

Abstract: In the PittSmartLiving project, we view the shift to multimodal transportation in a holistic way. We will design, develop, deploy, and evaluate a platform that will integrate information from and align the incentives of all involved stakeholders (commuters, transport operators, local businesses, and employers) towards increasing the utilization and quality of public transportation.

Our overall aim in this project is to synthesize desired behaviors in populations of bacterial and mammalian cells. To this goal, we define the basis of a next-generation cyber-physical system (CPS) called biological CPS (bioCPS). The enabling technologies are synthetic biology and micron-scale mobile robotics. Synthetic genetic circuits for decision making and local communication among the cells are automatically synthesized using a Bio-Design Automation (BDA) workflow.

This project addresses perceived safety within the context of autonomous driving. Self-driving cars have great potential to transform our transportation system, but their technical safety does not necessarily indicate how a human will perceive the safety of autonomous driving, especially if the driving style of the passenger is less aggressive than that of the self-driving car.