Towards Optimized Operation of Cost-Constrained Complex Cyber-Physical-Human Systems

Self-driving cars and home assistants provide just a small glimpse of the future cost-costrainted complex cyber-physical-human systems (CPHS) that will integrate engineering systems with the natural word and humans. This project will devise new mathematical tools and methods to systematically describe CPHS and optimize their operation. The application focus is on wireless body area networks, a natural CPHS representative with humans in the loop, heavily resource-constrained operation, and heterogeneous components that are intertwined with and altered by human behavior. The end will result will help understand important factors related to the operation of CPHS and how to optimize their operation. It will advance stochastic modeling, estimation and control theories to collectively address the challenges associated with this problem. It will also expose underrepresented K-12 students in Albany city to STEM fields from the lens of CPHS through project-based school visits and hands-on workshops on simple sensor systems, and prepare UAlbany students to become CPHS innovators by introducing CPHS concepts and activities in existing courses. Women and underrepresented groups will be encouraged to participate in this project by leveraging existing minority and underrepresented groups programs at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY).

CPHS have the potential to adaptively optimize their operation towards continuous real-time monitoring of an individual's state, environment and related behaviors, while providing real-time recommendations. To unleash the potential of CPHS, unique challenges related to sensing, communication, computation and control need to be jointly addressed in the presence of heterogeneous data, resource constraints and humans-in-the-loop. This fundamental research will advance cyber-physical systems science by devising new mathematical tools and methods, and a theoretical framework that can be used as a building block for various CPHS applications. Specifically, the project will (i) devise a new theoretical stochastic model to describe key CPHS variables and their interactions, (ii) design novel accurate and scalable estimators for CPHS and derive relevant theoretical performance bounds to quantify the fundamental limits of the estimation process in this context, and (iii) devise new controlled sensing, commmunication, and recommendations strategies to optimize the operation of systems with complex dynamics and heterogeneous capabilities.

News

• (02/2021) Recognized by UAlbany for winning highly competitive and prestigious federal grants during 2020.

• (01/2021) One paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2021)

  • Optimum Feature Ordering for Dynamic Instance-wise Joint Feature Selection and Classification, Y. Liyanage, D.-S. Zois

• (11/2020) Invited to serve in the organizing committee of the NSF CPS PI Meeting to held virtually, June 2-4, 2020.

• (08/2020) One paper accepted at the 2020 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ACSSC 2020)

  • Knowing When to Stop: Joint Heterogeneous Feature Selection and Classification, I. Nazar, D.-S. Zois, C. Chelmis

• (06/2020) Yasitha Liyanage passed his doctoral candidacy exam. Congratulations Yasitha!

• (06/2020) Yasitha Liyanage is embarking on a three month exciting research internship at Amazon.

• (06/2020) My NSF CAREER award on advancing the understanding of cyber-physical-human systems is featured in the UAlbany NewsCenter and the Business Section of Times Union.

• (04/2020) PhD student Sachini Ekanayake presented her work on Context-Aware Human State Modeling and Monitoring at the Annual University at Albany Research Conference.

• (04/2020) Preprint of our work available on arXiv

  • On-the-Fly Joint Feature Selection and Classification, Y. Liyanage, D.-S. Zois, C. Chelmis

• (04/2020) Received National Science Foundation (NSF) award entitled CAREER: Towards Optimized Operation of Cost-Constrained Complex Cyber-Physical-Human Systems ($524,480, 2020-2025). [UAlbany CEAS, UAlbany Division of Research, USC EE]