William C. Sullivan - US grants

Proposal #: CNS 07-07975 07-07944 07-08420
PI(s): Abdelzaher, Tarek F.; Johnson Scott D.; Goddard, Stephen M.; Ci, Song; Lu, Chenyang
Kumar,Panganamala R.;Sullivan,William C.;Vaidya,Nitin H. Peng,Dongming;Perez,Lance C.;Shariff,Hamid R.Roman, Gruia C.
Institution: U Illinois- UC U Nebraska-Lincoln Washington U.
Champaign, IL 61820-7402- Lincoln NE 68588-0439 St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
Title: Collab Rsch:CRD/IAD:Towadrs Cyber-Physical Computing at Scale: A Life-Size Experimental Facility for Applied Sensor Networks Research

Project Proposed:
This collaborative project, developing a large experimental outdoors facility (consisting of a large sensor network) to promote cyber-physical computing research, stimulates several areas of practical cyber-physical computing research, including:
. Software engineering for cyber-physical systems;
. Sensor Network development tools and programming abstractions;
. Low-level communication challenges;
. Embedded and real-time computing; and
. Data mining of the physical world (to identify anomalous or interesting patterns in streams of real-time data).
Cyber-physical systems enhance our interaction with the external environment in a similar fashion to the way the Internet changed how we communicate. Hence cyber-physical computing represents an era in computing where logical processing is more tightly intertwined with the external physical world. These systems offer a myriad of new challenges that stem from combining processing, communication, and physical interaction with the external world. Promoting practical cyber-physical computing research entails adequate experimental testbeds that allow evaluation, validation, and fine tuning of different ideas. The fine-granularity instrumentation required serves as a unifying theme across various studies. Sensor network technology is expected to economically address this need once key sensor network research impediments are resolved. This research facility is likely to be unique in the nation in its scale.

Broader Impacts: This work creates opportunities for interdisciplinary research where problems are solved utilizing CS/CE technology in the context of real applications drawn from environmental and atmospheric science, biology, anthropology, geology, agriculture, etc. The facility enables, among others, studies of infectious disease propagation, climate change, deforestation, and global warming. Additionally, the infrastructure offers active learning educational opportunities.

This project develops a novel computational Green Infrastructure (GI) design framework that integrates interactive, neighborhood-scale, collaborative design by multiple stakeholders ("crowd-sourced" design) with multi-scale models of ecosystem and human impacts. The following research questions are being addressed: (1) How well does coupling of site-scale ecohydrology with catchment-scale hydraulic routing improve predictions? (2) How well can stakeholder preferences be predicted using design image feature extraction and machine learning? (3) What interactive optimization and visualization techniques lead to the most rapid and complete consensus among diverse stakeholders? (4) Do stakeholders using interactive cyberinfrastructure tools consider more options and explore more of the GI design space?

A "crowd-sourced" design framework is developed to enable stakeholders to interactively create and evaluate potential GI designs that reflect consideration of the full breadth of social, economic, and environmental criteria. The research questions are evaluated in diverse neighborhoods within three urban catchments in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, working closely with environmental non-governmental organizations to ensure that the results will provide significant benefits to community stakeholders. The models developed in this project are the first to integrate criteria for human and ecosystem wellbeing with site- and watershed-scale hydrologic processes, a key advance for improving understanding and implementation of GI design. Map and image visualization identifies which visualization approaches best support improving stakeholder engagement for achieving consensus using interactive collaborative design. This makes technical advances in interactive optimization and model parameterization accessible to the broad range of stakeholders, from regulators and planners to contractors and homeowners.

This project builds upon a highly interdisciplinary and well-connected team of researchers and stakeholders from across the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the local Champaign-Urbana community. Through a series of stakeholder meetings and community outreach, our team will explore and define challenges, barriers, and opportunities for deploying and modifying technology to address community violence. Our investigation will focus on social science issues, such as how best to design smartphone apps to reduce violence, as well as technological issues, such as how to assure data privacy so that users do not risk revealing their identities at any stage of the research and community activity process.

This project investigates the creation and scalability of the smart community concept by bringing together a team of engineers, social and behavioral scientists, and a community partner - the municipal government of the City of Champaign - to leverage an open-source digital platform, the Rokwire Smart City Platform, and build an integrative community response to violence. Rokwire is an open-source mobile software platform developed by Smart, Healthy Communities, an interdisciplinary initiative based at UIUC. Designed to be the open-source system for tomorrow’s smart communities, it is a mobile ecosystem that puts people and privacy first while combining multiple streams of data and sensor technologies and integrating that information into a single, open-source platform. This project is proposing to design the coverage and functionality of Rokwire with the local community, and in particular, the City of Champaign, which has a violent crime rate of double the national average, to create functionalities in Rokwire that serve the community’s desire to reduce violence. Our long-term goal is to use this effort as a testbed for interested communities country-wide. The planning grant will seek to address timely research questions in the social science and technological dimensions. In the social science dimension, this project will build Rokwire to create, together with the City of Champaign, a violence reporting, tracking, and intervention capacity for Rokwire that will a) be designed with community input to evaluate the prevalence of, and reduce, violence in Champaign and b) work with the community to investigate and minimize unintended consequences (e.g., racial profiling, victim-blaming) associated with violence reporting technology. In the technological dimension, this project will address pressing questions relating to communities and researchers extracting useful and informative data while preserving individual privacy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.