Call for Papers: Special Issue on the "Cyber‐Physical Systems for Medical Applications" of IEEE Design & Test

A Special Issue on the "Cyber‐Physical Systems for Medical Applications" of IEEE Design & Test is being planned for publication in September/October 2015. We invite you to submit your papers by October 15, 2014. Information about this Special Issue can be found at:
http://www.eng.ucy.ac.cy/theocharides/ieeedt/CFP_MedCPS2014_DandT.pdf

Prospective authors should follow the submission guidelines for IEEE Design & Test. All manuscripts must be submitted electronically to the IEEE Manuscript Central Web site at http://www.manuscriptcentral.com/. Indicate that you are submitting your article to the special issue on “Cyber‐Physical Systems for Medical Applications”. All papers will undergo the standard IEEE Design & Test review process.

For any question, feel free to contact the Guest Editors:
Paul Bogdan, pbogdan@usc.edu
Rahul Mangharam, rahulm@seas.upenn.edu

TerraSwarm Investigator Carlos Guestrin Talks about GraphLab's New Machine-Learning Software

TerraSwarm investigator and GraphLab co-founder / CEO Carlos Guestrin, was recently interviewed by gigaom.com about the release of their new machine learning commercial software, GraphLab Create.   GraphLab was launched in 2013 to develop an open-source software platform for high-performance, scalable machine learning and graph analytics.  The new software they have developed allows users to run a number of popular machine learning tasks on data stored in graphs or tables.

The article quotes Guestrin:

The goal of Create is to help savvy engineers or data scientists take their machine learning projects from idea to production. It includes a handful of modules for building certain types of popular workloads, including recommendation engines, graph analysis and clustering and regression algorithms.

One of Create’s main benefits is simplicity. Users write, test and deploy their jobs in Python, and the jobs execute in GraphLab’s C++ engine to step up the speed. Jobs can execute on a laptop or across a cluster of servers running Hadoop (with YARN), and built-in management tooling lets users monitor running jobs. 

The way iOS did for mobile applications, Guestrin wants GraphLab Create to make it so anybody with the inclination and a modicum of coding skills can start building machine learning applications without worrying about all the hairy details around optimization, deployment and other historically time-consuming processes. 

Can a software product like GraphLab Create democratize machine learning?  To read more of Guestrin's comments and what capabilities GraphLab plans to include in future versions of their software, go to: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/15/graphlab-wants-to/.

Robotics Fellowship at UPenn Established with UTRC Gift

United Technologies Research Center, the research and innovation arm of United Technologies Corp., has gifted $250,000 to the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science to establish a fellowship in robotics, according to Penn News. It will provide financial support to doctoral candidates and doctoral research students working in Penn Engineering’s GRASP (General Robotics Automation, Sensing and Perception) Laboratory.  

Vijay Kumar, Penn Engineering’s UPS Foundation Professor and TerraSwarm Researcher, was quoted in the article:

“UTRC’s investment will enable strategic collaboration with one of the country’s leading industry research laboratories. The GRASP Laboratory integrates computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering in an environment that fosters interaction between students, research staff and faculty. We are focusing on advanced technologies that enable autonomous operation of aerial and ground vehicles in unstructured environments. The UTRC gift will allow doctoral students to investigate and develop solutions to these problems.” 

In the article, David Parekh, UTRC Vice President, Research, and Director was quoted:

“Research and curriculum development in robotics and intelligent systems is relevant to many of United Technologies’ products. Working with Penn Engineering and other forward-thinking universities helps us further develop expertise and also attract talent in areas where research and technology help evolve industries critical to our nation’s economy.”

UTRC, United Technologies Research Center, provides advanced technologies to businesses of United Technologies (UTC) —an industry leader in high technology products and services for the building and aerospace industries.  UTC is one of the industry partners of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, which provides funding to the TerraSwarm Research Center.

To read the Penn News article in its entirety, go to: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/utrc-gift-establishes-robotics-fellowship-university-pennsylvania.

3 Minute Video about the CITRIS Invention Lab

There is now a 3-minute video about the CITRIS Invention Lab at UC Berkeley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q1v4d3BOBU

"The CITRIS Invention Lab supports faculty, student and community innovation by providing the knowledge, tools and support to rapidly design and prototype novel interactive products, embedded sensing systems and integrated mobile devices. The new facility will be a vital piece of the CITRIS pipeline running from the minds of researchers through CITRIS laboratories, and into the markets, industries, and streets of the world. The 1,700 ft² Invention Lab is located on the first floor of Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley and supports 3 major functions:

• Learn: Faculty teach Engineering and New Media courses on interactive product design and prototyping.
• Build: The lab offers a full suite of tools, technical support and fabrication services for creating functional prototypes.
• Launch: The lab promotes turning concepts and ideas into new ventures by offering work space for the Foundry business incubator."

(Source: http://invent.citris-uc.org/about/)

We used resources from the Invention Lab during the May 29 SwarmOS Workshop (http://www.terraswarm.org/platforms/wiki/Main/May2014SwarmOSWorkshop).

New TerraSwarm Faculty Member Alex Halderman Comments on Electronic Voting Machine Tampering

In the recent elections in India, the press raised concerns about the apparent ease of tampering with electronic voting machines. Hari Prasad, with private sector cyber security firm NetIndia, helped expose the flaws in the machines.

New TerraSwarm faculty member, Alex Halderman (University of Michigan) has been collaborating with Hari Prasad of NetIndia on preventing election hackers.

In an article on SciDev.Net, View on Private Sector: Heading off Election Hackers, Halderman was quoted:

“The problem we faced going into this work was that India didn’t really have an indigenous research community looking into election security issues,” says Halderman. “So it was just absolutely crucial to be able to have people with local knowledge of the technology community, of the political process, and access to the technology.”

“In terms of developing communities within each country that are able to deal with the difficult technical details surrounding conducting elections with computers, I think it’s going to be essential to reach out to the private tech sector and try to forge new partnerships,” says Halderman. "This is because there are “simply not enough” people in academia looking into the problem."

According to Halderman, further academic-private research partnerships are essential to election security in other countries that are experimenting with electronic voting systems.

To read the article in full, please visit:
http://www.scidev.net/global/governance/analysis-blog/view-on-private-sector-election-hackers.html

SwarmOS Workshop at Berkeley Develop Internet of Things Accessors

The TerraSwarm SwarmOS Workshop was held at UC Berkeley on Thursday, May 29, 2014. It was attended by nearly 30 people from University of California, Berkeley, University of Texas at Dallas, University of Michigan, University of Illinois and University of California, San Diego. The primary goal of the workshop was to get developers set up with the software from various teams by writing accessors, a component class that a swarmlet instantiates to access a service.

The following teams were successful in creating Accessors, many of which interfaced between physical hardware such as the ElectricImp and Philips Hue light bulbs and used technology developed by TerraSwarm participants such as Ptolemy II and Get All The Data (GATD).

•         Brad Campbell, David Jun, Edward Lee: Ptolemy / Get All the Data (GATD) Interface 
•         Pat Pannuto, Nikunj Bajaj: Ptolemy model that uses Strain Sensors to determine who won a Thumb War
•         John MacCallum, Long Le: Synthetic Disco
•         Mark Oehlberg, Patricia Derler, Bjoern Hartmann, Alec Dara-Abrams: Breathalyzer
•         Chris Shaver, Ilya Rostovtsev: Asynchronous channels in JavaScript Accessors
•         Meghan Clark, Armin Wasicek, Matt Weber: Spatial Authentication
•         Nitesh Mor, Shuhei Emoto, Douglas Chan: Accessor for Sensor triggered Photo-taking
•         Roozbeh Jafari, Marten Lohstroh, Viswam Nathan: Real-time Emergency Detection using Ultrasonic Range Finders 

The presentations and other materials are available to TerraSwarm participants at: http://www.terraswarm.org/platforms/wiki/Main/May2014SwarmOSWorkshop.

Photo: The scene during the hack-a-thon (Credit: Alec Dara-Abrams).

Vijay Kumar's Lab Combines Tango with a Quadrotor

TerraSwarm researcher  and UPenn professor Vijay Kumar and his students have combined Google's Project Tango smartphone with a quadrotor to create an autonomous drone that can navigate without assistance using only off-the-shelf parts.  By attaching Tango to the drone, the need to install additional sensors is eliminated, at least in the test environment, according to an article written for the phillysportsreport.com.

To watch a video of their drone in action or read more about it, go to:
http://phillysportsreport.com/technology-22/google-s-project-tango-is-the-brains-behind-this-autonomous-quadrotor-43.html