Cyber Physical Computing

Department of Computer Science

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

logoPartner

Sites

 

logoV

 

Home

Introduction

Research

People

Papers

Why Join Us?

 

For inquiries, please see contact info.


Cyber Physical Computing

 

Computer Science has always been an application-oriented discipline. Its greatest advances that broadly altered the quality of life, such as the Internet, databases, and supercomputers stemmed primarily from applications brought about by needs of individuals, businesses, and the government. At present, an expanding frontier for computer scientists lies at the intersection of the logical and physical realms. As computing elements become embedded more pervasively in our environment, a new cyber-physical fabric arises in which logical processing is very deeply intertwined with the distributed physical environment in which it occurs. Computing becomes less obtrusive and a more natural part of the external world. It becomes more autonomous and less reliant on human input, intervention, and administration. Physical objects acquire new logical properties due to embedded computation, sensing, and actuation. New applications arise that improve the quality of life (e.g., smart assisted living facilities), enhance social experiences and human communication (e.g., new cyber-physical communication media), improve accessibility of information (e.g., wide-area data services), and help advance fundamental knowledge in many environmental, biological, and physical disciplines.

 

In this new realm, computer science must be redefined. New models and paradigms are needed for computation. New underlying theoretical foundations are needed to support such paradigms. New programming languages and distributed middleware tools must be developed around the emerging abstractions of cyber-physical computation. Networking must be redefined to integrate myriads of physical data sources, actuators, and computing elements, as well as to develop appropriate application-layer data services. New operating systems are needed that are optimized for the new computing realm, as opposed to the current machine architectures and applications. Data mining and machine learning techniques are needed to identify data patterns, learn context, and act autonomously without human assistance. 

 

The Cyber-Physical Computing Group is a multidisciplinary team that investigates the aforementioned aspects of tomorrow’s computing systems.

Selected Publications

L. Luo, T. Abdelzaher, T. He, and J. A. Stankovic, "EnviroSuite: An Environmentally Immersive Programming Framework for Sensor Networks," Accepted to ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 2006.

William Hawkins and Tarek Abdelzaher, "Towards Feasible Region Calculus: An End-to-end Schedulability Analysis of Real-Time Multistage Execution," IEEE Real-time Systems Symposium, Miami, Florida, December 2005.

Tarek F. Abdelzaher, Shashi Prabh, Raghu Kiran, "On Real-time Capacity Limits of Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Real-time Systems Symposium, Lisbon, Portugal, December 2004.

 

Research Themes

A versatile collection of new research directions are started in this group. On the analytic front, new fundamental theory and models are sought for distributed computation. Capacity limits are investigated to quantify fundamental tradeoffs between time, space, and energy.  On the systems side, challenges are addressed in developing the next generation middleware for cyber-physical applications. New protocols, compilers, programming languages, and operating systems are needed. A categorization of research directions is listed below. 

 

Sensor Networks: Today, hundreds of millions of sensors are deployed in our environment. This includes cameras on myriads of cell-phones, ubiquitous indoor temperature sensors, garage-door motion sensors, web cams in public spaces, among others. Hardware miniaturization and wireless communication advances suggest increased proliferation of sensing devices and their integration into wireless sensor networks for myriads of urban, military, social, and medical applications. Zigbee, Bluetooth and other wireless technologies present possible options for the interconnection of sensors. Research on sensor networks investigates network protocols, services, resource management, and programming paradigms tailored to the new environment.

Future Internet Architecture: The Internet was born as a data communication medium, yet it is being used increasingly for information retrieval. Such information will typically originate from embedded sources. Human needs for bandwidth are limited, since our capacity to source or sink information is bounded (e.g., by limits of sensory perception). Future growth in network bandwidth demand will eventually come from embedded sources. Data collected from such sources will need to be organized for efficient search, retrieval, and proactive event detection. This suggests a fundamental re-thinking of the Internet architecture around the concepts of data retrieval, as opposed to point-to-point or multiparty communication.

Smart Attire: Our future wardrobe is the next likely platform for embedded computing, after PDAs, cell phones, and multimedia devices such as iPODs. A suite of human-centric software applications will execute on the new platform. Research is needed into new operating system abstractions, computing models, languages, and services (such as support for security and privacy) in Smart Attire applications. This project develops experimental prototypes of attire fitted with sensors, microprocessors, and memory, using them as the vehicle to investigate the aforementioned topics.

Environmentally Immersive Programming: This project develops a new distributed computing paradigm suitable for cyber-physical computing applications marked by heavy interactions between the logical realm and the external environment. The paradigm exports an address space that combines logical objects and (addressable representations of) external physical objects in the same “cyber-physical” space.

Feasible Region Calculus: This project develops a fundamentally new theory for analysis of temporal and spatial properties in open systems based on feasible regions. A calculus is developed for composing the feasible regions of subsystems to generate those of the overall application. Results applicable to the understanding of fundamental capacity limits of new models of computation.

Software Predictability: The increasing complexity and heterogeneity of future distributed embedded software systems and the increasing sources of unpredictability that affect software performance in the face of physical time and space constraints call for new theory, architectural mechanisms, computing paradigms, and programming abstractions to support predictable software behavior, analyzability, and performance guarantees. In this group, we develop new analysis tools, middleware, high-level interfaces, and underlying analytic foundations for software predictability. Of particular interest is predictability of temporal behavior, which is of special importance in real-time and embedded systems.