Distinguished Lecture Series with Jonathan Sprinkle, Ph.D.

Speaker(s): Jonathan Sprinkle, Ph.D., Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering — University of Arizona

Presentation Title: Autonomous and Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems and the Era of Big Data

Date/Time: Thursday, February 25th, 2021 | 1:00 PM ET

Continuing Education Units (CEU): .1*
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Abstract: This talk describes autonomous and intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and how the availability of experimental testbeds in CPS has enabled discoveries applicable for societal-scale systems. One such platform, the Cognitive and Autonomous Testbed Vehicle (CAT Vehicle), has participated in several high-profile experiments regarding heterogeneous human-driven and semi-autonomous traffic flow. Success in these experiments has built upon several layers of fundamental advancements in simulation, model-based tool integration, and computationally-aware controller design. Recent results include approaches to quantify the reproducibility of CPS simulations, and how to scale up simulations that can implement software-in-the-loop controllers with the same kinds of delay and sensor noise they will experience when deployed. As CPS embraces the era of Big Data, researchers will rely more on data to train controllers, or will seek ways to validate controllers learned from repeated simulation. The talk concludes with several ongoing efforts that explore how collaboration with researchers in application domain fields can dramatically expand available data sets through the ground-truth data available directly from modern vehicles equipped with radar and other environmental sensors. The convergence of these data sets, along with rich simulation and data-driven or physics-informed discovery tools that are accessible to a multidisciplinary range of researchers, lays the foundation for accelerating research discoveries and facilitating their transition to practice. It also provides unique opportunities for exploring the security and privacy challenges that accompany societal-scale systems as data-driven approaches are employed.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Jonathan Sprinkle is the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, and the Interim Director of the Transportation Research Institute. In 2020 he was named a Distinguished Scholar of the University of Arizona. From 2017-2019 he served as a Program Director in Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart & Connected Communities at the National Science Foundation in the CISE Directorate. In 2013 he received the NSF CAREER award, and in 2009, he received the UA’s Ed and Joan Biggers Faculty Support Grant for work in autonomous systems. His work has an emphasis for industry impact, and he was recognized with the UA “Catapult Award” by Tech Launch Arizona in 2014, and in 2012 his team won the NSF I-Corps Best Team award. His research interests and experience are in model-based approaches to cyber-physical systems, and he teaches courses ranging from software modeling to mobile application development and software engineering.