Abstract: Autonomous cars. Robots at work, at play, at home. Intelligent, energy-efficient, earthquake-proof buildings. Physical infrastructure monitored and controlled by sensor nets. Embedded medical devices. Unobtrusive assistive technology. What is common to these systems? They have a computational core that interacts with the physical world. These cyber-physical systems are engineered systems that require tight conjoining of and coordination between the computational (discrete) and the physical (continuous). Cyber-physical systems are rapidly penetrating every aspect of our lives, with potential impact on sectors critical to U.S. security and competitiveness, including aerospace, automotive, chemical production, civil infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, materials, and transportation. What new science is needed to model and understand cyber-physical systems? What are technical challenges to ensuring they behave safely and adapt to unpredictable events in their environment? Expediting progress to meet these kinds of questions will require new kinds of collaborations: among people from different disciplines; and between academics with common solutions to seemingly different problems and industry with the domain expertise. In my talk I will outline some of the research opportunities and challenges in cyber-physical systems, as driven by societal expectations, technology innovation, and scientific needs.
Biography: Dr. Jeannette M. Wing is the President's Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004-2007, she was Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. Currently on leave from CMU, she is the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.
Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current focus is on the foundations of trustworthy computing.
Professor Wing was or is on the editorial board of eleven journals. She has been a member of many advisory boards, including: the Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) Technical Advisory Group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Tecbnology (PCAST), the National Academies of Sciences's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, ACM Council, the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board, NSF's CISE Advisory Committee, Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, and the Intel Research Pittsburgh's Advisory Board. She is a member of the Sloan Research Fellowships Program Committee. She is a member of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Professor Wing is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow.