What Makes a Good System Designer?

In her article Masters of Abstraction, Ann Steffora Mutschler explains,"Good system designers are a unique breed. While it’s easy enough to distinguish the traits that define a good one from a weak one, it’s much harder to determine who possesses those traits before they are put to the test, or whether or how they can be taught."

The piece includes several sources who share their thoughts on the definition and characteristics of a good systems designer. TerraSwarm PI Edward A. Lee appears in the article and observes, "that there are enormous differences between good designers and weak designers. The productivity difference can be orders of magnitude. Interestingly, he said he hasn’t been able to detect any other correlations with personality traits. Some of the good designers are nerds, and some of them are outgoing and gregarious. It’s all over the map."

President Obama Honors TerraSwarm Funded PI with Top Award

TerraSwarm funded PI Rahul Mangharam from University of Pennsylvania has been selected as one of the recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers for his work inventing a formal methodology to test and verify the correct operation of medical device software. Rahul Mangharam’s research improves the safety of medical devices and reduces healthcare costs by ensuring that a device never drives the patient into an unsafe state, while providing effective therapy.

“These early-career scientists are leading the way in our efforts to confront and understand challenges from climate change to our health and wellness,” President Obama said. “We congratulate these accomplished individuals and encourage them to continue to serve as an example of the incredible promise and ingenuity of the American people.”

Intended to recognize some of the best scientists and engineers with extraordinary demonstrated potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge, awardees are selected based on their pursuit of innovative research and their commitment to community service.  For scientists and engineers early in their careers this award is the highest honor conferred by the U.S. government.

SRC to Host TECHCON September 12 - 13, 2016

Semiconductor Research Corporation’s TECHCON 2016 is scheduled for September 12 – 13, 2016 at the Renaissance Austin Hotel in Austin Texas.

According to the email announcement, the general call for abstracts will open on Monday March 14, 2016.

TECHCON is largely student-presented and is an outstanding opportunity for networking with the world’s leading semiconductor industry companies and with researchers from other universities. Students will be invited to submit an abstract for consideration based on their association with SRC sponsored research. Abstracts are reviewed by technical committees that include member company representatives. Students with accepted abstracts are invited to present at TECHCON and have a unique opportunity to network with other researchers, students, and industry representatives. Because TECHCON 2016 is open only to the SRC community, authors are not precluded from publishing/presenting in open literature at a later date.

A separate call for students participating in Undergraduate programs will be made, opening on Monday April 18, 2016.

Please watch your email and the SRC website for more details for information about TECHCON 2016.

TerraSwarm Funded Researcher Roozbeh Jafari's Group Developing Wearable Technology to Translate Sign Language into Text

Using a system of sensors to record and decode the muscle activity associated with each sign, TerraSwarm funded researcher Roozbeh Jafari's group at Texas A&M University is developing a wearable technology to translate sign language into text. Possible applications include decreased communication barriers for those who use sign language.

The current proof of concept device is able to send the resulting translation from the device to a computer or smartphone using Bluetooth.  The system is designed to learn from its user to accommodate the individual movement of each person. Sophisticated algorithms allow this process of adjustment and are also used to enable real time translation. Going forward the team hopes to develop a smaller device that can be worn as a watch, add a synthetic voice, and  translate full sentences rather then individual signs. 

TerraSwarm funded paper “Fast Redistribution of a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots” Receives Best Paper Award at the 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies

The paper, "Fast Redistribution of a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots," received best paper award at the 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies in New York.  

The paper states: "The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of ONR grants N00014-15-1-2115 and N00014-14-1-05-10, ARL grand W911NF-08-2-0004, NSF grant IIS-1426840, and TerraSwarm, one of six centers of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA."

Amanda Prorok, M. Ani Hsieh, Vijay Kumar. Fast Redistribution of a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots. Proceedings of 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies, December, 3- 5, 2015, New York.

Abstract:
We present a method that distributes a swarm of heterogeneous robots among a set of tasks that require specialized capabilities in order to be completed. We model the system of heterogeneous robots as a community of species, where each species (robot type) is defined by the traits (capabilities) that it owns. Our method is based on a continuous abstraction of the swarm at a macroscopic level, as we model robots switching between tasks. We formulate an optimization problem that produces an optimal set of transition rates for each species, so that the desired trait distribution among the tasks is reached as quickly as possible. Our solution is based on an analytical gradient, and is computationally efficient, even for large choices of traits and species. Finally, we show that our method is capable of producing fast convergence times when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

TerraSwarm Funded PI Vijay Kumar Receives $5.5 Million DARPA Grant

A three year, $5.5 Million dollar grant has been awarded to GRASP Laboratory at The University of Pennsylvania from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency for the purpose of creating new robots that are capable of navigating unfamiliar environments independently and swiftly.

TerraSwarm funded PI Vijay Kumar and fellow researchers Daniel Lee, Camillo J. Taylor, Kostas Daniilidis and Jianbo Shi will use their various expertise to develop autonomous robots, capable of flying 20 meters per second, and weighing less than three kilograms.  Possible applications include search and rescue and disaster response, particularly in situations that are hazardous for humans.

TerraSwarm funded paper "Robust Online Monitoring of Signal Temporal Logic" Receives Best Paper Award at Runtime Verification '15, Vienna

The paper, "Robust online Monitoring of Signal Temporal Logic," received best paper award at Runtime Verification '15 in Vienna.  

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, by NSF Expeditions grant CCF-1139138, and by Toyota under the CHESS center at UC Berkeley."

Citation:

Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukhh, Alexandre Donze, Shromona Ghosh, Xiaoqing Jin, Garvit Juniwal, Sanjit A. Seshia. Robust Online Monitoring of Signal TemporalLogic, Runtime Verification '15, Vienna, September 22, 2015.

Abstract:

Signal Temporal Logic(STL) is a formalism used to rigorously specify requirements of cyberphysical systems (CPS), i.e., systems mixing digital or discrete components in interaction with a continuous environment or analog components. STL is naturally equipped with a quantitative semantics which can be used for various purposes: from assessing the robustness of a specification to guiding searches over the input and parameter space with the goal of falsifying the given property over system behaviors. Algorithms have been proposed and implemented for offline computation of such quantitative semantics, but only few methods exist for an online setting, where one would want to monitor the satisfaction of a formula during simulation. In this paper, we formalize a semantics for robust online monitoring of partial traces, i.e., traces for which there might not be enough data to decide the Boolean satisfaction (and to compute its quantitative counterpart). We propose an efficient algorithm to compute it and demonstrate its usage on two large scale real-world case studies coming from the automotive domain and from CPS education in a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) setting. We show that savings in computationally expensive simulations far out- weigh any overheads incurred by an online approach.