TerraSwarm Funded Paper "Control Improvisation with Probabilistic Temporal Specifications" Receives Best Paper Award at 1st IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI'16)

TerraSwarm funded paper "Control Improvisation with Probabilistic Temporal Specifications" received best paper award at the 1st IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI'16) in Berlin, Germany. 

The paper states: "This work was supported in part by TerraSwarm, one of six centers of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA."

Ilge Akkaya, Daniel J. Fremont, Rafael Valle, Alexandre Donze, Edward A. Lee, Sanjit A. Seshia. "Control Improvisation with Probabilistic Temporal Specifications". IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI'16),  April 2-4, 2016.

Abstract:
We consider the problem of generating randomized control sequences for complex systems typically actuated by human agents. Our approach leverages a concept known as control improvisation, which is based on a combination of learning and synthesis from formal specifications. We learn from existing data a generative model (for instance, an explicit duration hidden Markov model, or EDHMM) and then supervise this model in order to guarantee that the generated sequences satisfy some desirable specifications given in Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL). We present an implementation of our approach and apply it to the problem of mimicking the use of lighting appliances in a residential unit, with potential applications to home security and resource management. We present experimental results showing that our approach produces realistic control sequences, similar to recorded data based on human actuation, while satisfying suitable formal requirements.