Lectures

  • Learning, Reasoning, and Intelligence in the Open World: From Principles to Practice
    Deborah Estrin
    Professor
    Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) - UCLA Computer Sciences
    UCLA Lecture

    Participatory sensing systems leveraging mobile phones offer unprecedented observational capacity at the scale of the individual; at the same time they are remarkably scalable and affordable given the wide proliferation of cellular phone infrastructure and consumer devices that incorporate location services such as GPS, digital imagers, accelerometers, bluetooth access to off-board sensors, and easy programmability. These systems can be leveraged by individuals and communities to address a range of civic concerns, from safety and sustainability to personal and public health. At the same time that they will push even further on our societies concept of privacy and private space. This talk will describe the driving applications and technical challenges, drawing upon work-in-progress at the center for embedded networked sensing at UCLA.

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  • Learning, Reasoning, and Intelligence in the Open World: From Principles to Practice
    Dr. Eric Horvitz
    Principal Researcher, Research Area Manager
    Microsoft Research
    CITRIS Lecture

    Systems that learn and reason from streams of data promise to provide extraordinary value to people and society. I will discuss directions with harnessing machine perception, learning, and inference in the open world, highlighting key ideas in the context of projects in transportation, energy, healthcare, and communications. After reviewing efforts in several realms, I will reflect on directions regarding the capture and use of data in accordance with the preferences of people about their privacy.

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Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

In the Fall 2008, the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT), the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and Nokia presented and hosted the Distinguished Lecture Series on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Cyber-physical systems are systems that integrate computational processes and physical processes. The tight integration between computation and physics differentiates CPS from traditional embedded systems and is the focus of active research in numerous scientific communities around the world. Mobile Millennium is a Cyber-physical system that is based on participatory sensing. The physics of the system (motion of people in the transportation network) is modeled inside the traffic estimation engine of Mobile Millennium and is coupled to the information flow (sensing, using the cellular communication network).

The lectures series was launched during the Fall semester of 2008, to coincide with the launch of Mobile Millennium. It gathered experts in the field of Cyber-physical systems, who each gave their own perspective on this topic, in light of their respective experience in the context of their own research.

All lectures are now posted on youTube and the CITRIS website, and can be watched online (see list below).

  • We are just getting started - the mobile revolution yet to come
    Bob Iannucci
    Head of Nokia Research Center
    Nokia's Corporate Research Unit
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    Mobile devices have long since moved beyond being mere phones and now match the computing power of desktop systems from just a few years ago. Leveraging their roving nature, their special place as deeply personal devices holding our most valuable information, and their built-in array of ever-more-powerful sensors, these devices are coming of their own as a wildly powerful platform for innovation and opportunity. Bob Iannucci, Nokia's worldwide Chief Technology Officer now based in Palo Alto, California, will offer a glimpse into this next wave of mobility. How these devices, sensors and information will mesh, and the amazing society-transforming capabilities that they will usher in, are nothing short of astounding. Challenges around security, privacy and scalability will abound, but the global scope of the opportunity makes this an incredibly exciting area for those with the imagination and drive to develop it.

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  • Networked control for autonomous systems
    Richard M. Murray
    Professor
    Control and Dynamical Systems - California Institute of Technology
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    Increases in fast and inexpensive computing and communications have enabled a new generation information-rich control systems that rely on multi-threaded networked execution, distributed optimization, adaptation and learning, and contingency management in increasingly sophisticated ways. This talk will describe a framework for building such systems and lay out some of the challenges to control theory that must be addressed to enable systematic design and analysis. Applications include multi-vehicle systems performing cooperative tasks and autonomous systems with high-performance, distributed processing.

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  • Distributed Control of Engergy Management Systems
    Manfred Morari
    Professor
    Automatic Control Laboratory - ETH Zurich
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    River power plants are important contributors to the over 19% of world electricity produced by hydro-electric plants. Built in the natural course of a river, they produce energy by manipulating the water discharge through their facilities. They therefore introduce fluctuations in the river's natural water level and flow, which might conflict with various constraints imposed for environmental and operational purposes. Motivated by these issues, we discuss the application of model predictive control for regulating the turbine discharge of river power plants, taking into account environmental, navigational and economical constraints and limitations. Large disturbances caused by the operation of locks are particularly investigated, as well as the issue of reducing abrasion by keeping the frequency of turbine discharge adjustments modest. In the US buildings consume 39% of the energy and produce 48% of the carbon emissions. We have recently started a project to utilize weather forecasts for building energy management to reduce consumption and improve comfort. We will summarize the potential benefits of a stochastic optimal control strategy in a wide range of locations and building types in Europe.

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  • Control systems software assurance
    Eric Feron
    Professor
    School of Aerospace Engineering - Georgia Institute of Technology
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    Control systems have historically been concerned with the development of provably good control software specifications for cyber-physical systems. Closely associated with control systems engineering, one can find extensive tools derived from numerical analysis, dynamical system theory, complex analysis, linear algebra and other fields. Comparatively speaking, little or no attention has been spent on control software, leaving it aside as an "implementation issue". In this talk, we will motivate the need to look more closely at control system software. After pointing out the commonalities existing between invariant theory and Lyapunov stability theory, we will outline some basic techniques that may help make control systems software more easily and independently verifiable. We will also describe ongoing efforts aimed at the case-by-case verification of auto coded software.

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  • Long actuator delays - extending the smith predictor to nonlinear
    Miroslav Krstic
    Professor
    Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - University of California, San Diego
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    One would be hard pressed to find "long actuator delays, "unknown delays," or "nonlinear control" co-existing in the same sentence in the control literature. This is due to the potential for finite escape in the presence of nonlinearity, and due to the uncertainty in the size of the infinite -dimensional part of the system's state in the case of unknown delay. It has been half a century since Otto Smith, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, invented the "predictor" feedback for compensating long but known actuator delays for linear systems. This method has since become one of the favorite tools in chemical process control and many other applications. I will show an extension of predictor feedback to nonlinear (possibly unstable) systems, which is enabled by "infinite dimensional/continuum backstepping backstepping." Backstepping yields the construction of Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional with which I have been able to prove robustness of predictor feedbacks to both underestimating and overestimating the length of the actuator delay, as well as to develop the first delay-adaptive controllers.

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  • Smart sensing technology: a new paradigm for structural health monitoring
    Bill F. Spencer
    Professor
    Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    The ability to continuously monitor the integrity of civil infrastructure in real-time offers the opportunity to reduce maintenance and inspection costs, while providing for increased safety to the public. Furthermore, after natural disasters, it is imperative that emergency facilities and evacuation routes, including bridges and highways, be assessed for safety. Addressing all of these issues is the objective of structural health monitoring (SHM).

    Smart sensors densely distributed over structures can provide rich information for structural health monitoring using their sensing, computational, and wireless communication capabilities. Though smart sensor technology has seen substantial advances during recent years, implementation of smart sensors on full-scale structures has been limited; interdisciplinary efforts to address issues in sensors, networks, and application specific algorithms have only now begun to germinate. Following an overview of these issues, a new paradigm for structural health monitoring employing a network of smart sensors will be presented. Because of its ability to meet the demands of data intensive applications such as SHM, Intel's Imote2 is adopted for this research. The performance of the proposed SHM system is first evaluated through experimental studies employing a three-dimensional truss structure. Subsequently, full-scale implementation on a historic bridge in Mahomet, Illinois is conducted. The system is investigated from the sensing, network, and SHM algorithmic perspectives and shown to perform effectively.

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  • Flocks and Fleets: Collective Motion and Sensing Networks in Nature and Robotics
    Naomi Leonard
    Professor
    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - Princeton University
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    From bird flocks to fish schools, animals move together and respond to their environment in remarkable ways; their natural collective motion patterns appear well choreographed and their collective survival strategies seem ingenious. Animal group behaviors inspire design for mobile multi-agent robotic systems, where demanding cooperative sensing tasks, such as exploration and sampling in an uncertain and dynamic environment, find their analogue in natural aggregation behaviors, such as foraging and feeding. However, bio-inspiration of this kind is not transparent because the natural "design" mechanisms are not well understood. The joint challenge is to explain the enabling mechanisms in animal groups and to define provable mechanisms for robotic groups. And this suggests an integrated approach: formal bio-inspired models and analysis tools derived to synthesize collective robotic motion and exploration can be used to evaluate design hypotheses for animal groups; subsequent revelations from the biology will in turn inspire new approaches for robotic systems. I will discuss mobile robot and animal networks using a common mathematical framework that builds on coupled oscillator dynamics and communication graphs. I will describe application to an adaptive ocean sampling network, a successful, recent field experiment in Monterey Bay, CA and an investigation of dynamics and decision-making in fish schools.

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  • A Theory of Robustness for Cyber-Physical Systems
    George Pappas
    Professor
    Electrical and Systems Engineering - University of Pennsylvania
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    One of the great challenges in cyber-physical systems is to define appropriate measures of system robustness. How should we define the robust execution of digital programs by physical systems that will be subject to uncertainty and noise? By reversing roles, how robust is the digital implementation of physical controllers and sensors in distributed computing platforms? Can we define appropriate measures of robustness across the cyber and physical world, in a manner that leads to efficient algorithms for overall system verification and design? In this talk, I will present an overview of our efforts towards addressing some of these challenges will be presented. Thinking of temporal logics as basic programming languages for physical systems, such as robots, we define robust, multi-valued semantics for temporal logic formulas, which capture not only the usual Boolean satisfiability, but also how robustly the physical system satisfies the digital specification. Based on this quantitative notion and using our recently developed notion of approximate bisimulation functions, we develop a simulation-based verification algorithm for determining the robustness of the overall system. The interesting and promising feature of our approach is that the more robust the system is with respect to the temporal logic specification, the less is the number of simulations that are required in order to verify the system. We then consider the problem of quantifying the performance gap between model-based controller design and platform-based implementation for modern embedded control systems. We first show that the performance gap between the model-level semantics of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers and their implementation-level semantics can be rigorously quantified if the controller implementation is executed on a predictable time-triggered architecture. Explicitly computing the impact of the implementation on overall system performance allows us to compare and partiallyorder different implementations with various scheduling or timing characteristics.

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  • Discrete mechanics and optimal control
    Jerrold Marsden
    Professor
    Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems - California Institute of Technology
    Nokia Distinguished Lectures on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) - 2008

    We and Nature try to optimize things all the time; find the shortest route to the grocery store, find the most efficient way to throw a discus, cats turning themselves over efficiently, etc. Optimal control is about finding control forces to perform optimal ways of carrying out a task. Many such systems are mechanical and special techniques for computing optimal controls in mechanics will be presented. These techniques are based on recent progress in discrete mechanics. The techniques will be illustrated by systems such as falling cats, reorienting a network of satellites, optimal space mission design, systems with constraints (such as a satellite with momentum wheels), helicopter dynamics, and efficient 2D and 3D robotic walkers.

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