This online seminar is composed of a series of talks by researchers and industry experts from some of the best institutions across the world, related to various aspects of Cyber-Physical Systems. The talks will be broadcast live on YouTube and registered participants will be able to engage in discussions with the speakers and other participants on a dedicated Slack group. The seminar is divided into various tracks spread over the course of two days.
What is a Cyber-Physical System
Truly complex, multidisciplinary, engineered systems, known as Cyber-Physical System (CPS), are emerging in today’s reality. These systems integrate physical, software, and network aspects in a sometimes adverse physical environment. We can find examples of CPS in autonomous cars, industrial control systems, robotics systems, medical monitoring, and automatic pilot avionics, to name a few.
The domain of CPS arises from the natural technological evolution of control systems, the increased reliability and speed of modern networks and the possibility of obtaining sophisticated coordination, supervision and control of complex, possibly distributed and interacting systems by means of software.
CPS conjugate in a single system a computer based (CYBER) part,characterized by discrete time behavior and isolation from the physical world, dominated by software and by algorithmic descriptions, and a PHYSICAL part, operating in the real, continuous time and in the concrete, tridimensional space, without isolation from the external world and dominated by kinematics, dynamics and all possible undesired influences of natural phenomena.
Tracks in the Seminar
MPM4CPS (Multi-Paradigm Modelling for CPS)
Multi-paradigm Modelling (MPM) proposes to model every part and aspect of a system explicitly, at the most appropriate level(s) of abstraction, using the most appropriate modelling formalism(s). Modelling languages engineering, including model transformation, and the study of their semantics, are used to realize MPM. MPM is seen as an effective answer to the challenges of designing CPS. MPM4CPS aims to promote the sharing of foundations, methods, techniques, and tools and to provide educational resources, to both academia and industry. This is achieved by bringing together and disseminating knowledge and experiments on CPS problems and MPM solutions
The foundational work on multi-paradigm modelling of CPS has been developed by the EU COST Action: IC1404 (MPM4CPS), which is a collaborative effort of scientists and engineers from over 32 countries. Many of our speakers were part of this group.
SE4CPS (Software Engg for CPS)
Increasing numbers of objects in our day life are controlled by computers: phones, aircraft, cars, buildings, manufacturing machines, musical instruments, etc. In these so-called cyber-physical systems, computers interact directly with the physical world through sensors and actuators. Those systems are becoming the key infrastructure and backbone of our society and are at the heart of revolutionary changes in our daily lives and economy.
The sophistication and complexity of CPSs keeps increasing, since they must realize more functions with limited resources, which makes them increasingly difficult to build and manage. In particular, the cyber (software) part of these systems is growing rapidly, and has become a key part in CPS, as they are the basis of operation for these systems.
For instance, the avionics industry has experienced exponential growth in software size, with the number of software lines of code in commercial aircraft roughly doubling every four years. These constant changes leads to the cost of rework due to the late discovery of design errors, reaching up to 70% of the cost of the software system itself. Therefore, the software aspects of CPS induce major challenges in their development.
BioCPS (Biology in CPS)
Bio-CPS are considered to be an integration of computational elements within biological systems. In a sense, Bio-CPS can be compared to the Cyber-Physical systems, in which the challenge is to make biological systems working along with computer systems. In biological systems the complexity is required in order to make the system more stable. By contrast, in cyber systems engineering, the complexity needs to be avoided as far as it is possible because it can bring instabilities. However, cyber systems complexity, even not desired, stems from the numerous interactions between components. Consequently, the main concern in Bio-CPS design is how to make these two kinds of systems coupling together to perform a common task with a high level of confidence.
BioCPS have far-reaching applications in real-life. Some of them include revolutionizing the healthcare system, medical instrumentation, medical technologies, and modelling diseases, infections, and the human immuno-response.
ML4CPS (Machine Learning for CPS)
While machine learning is widely practiced in cognitive domains, such as NLP, computer vision, speech recognition, etc, its impact on cyber-physical systems is only recently being understood. An important hurdle towards the deployment of machine learning in industrial systems is that machine learning has developed in Computer Science, whereas its applications in industrial domains require significant domain knowledge in disciplines that are remote from Computer Science. On the other hand, a large arsenal of ready-to-use machine learning tools and libraries exist (including ones supported by standard industrial modeling platforms like MATLAB), and therefore the domain expert can be readily trained to use these tools and techniques for advancing their industrial processes and design (R&D) activities.
Edu4CPS (Education for CPS)
Education has been accepted as a project for social and political transformation, with the development of each individual not only for her economic gains, but also for building a just and humane society. It also needs to promote awareness and build agency for sustainable development and harmonious co-existence. Global policy documents such as the Education for All, Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, emphasize universal education.
Poor investment in education results in poor quality of teacher education, and inadequate academic infrastructure. Teachers are unable and/or unwilling to provide support to the learning processes. In this context, digital technologies (aka Information and Communication Technologies, or ICT in short), are sometimes seen as a solution that can address curricular resource shortage, teacher shortage and teacher quality.
Applying CPS concepts in developing educational technologies can significantly improve these implementations and ensure efficiency. This is an up and coming field which includes the development of hardware and software facilitating both teaching and learning on various scales. Radical new ideas and platforms are coming up every day and modelling the interactions between the human component and the system can be effectively modeled using CPS concepts.
Startup4CPS (Startups for CPS)
Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are new class of engineered systems that integrate computation and physical processes in a dynamic environment. CPS encompasses technology areas of Cybernetics, Mechatronics, Design and Embedded systems, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and many more. The CPS systems are intelligent, autonomous and efficient and are expected to drive innovation in sectors as diverse as agriculture, water, energy, transportation, infrastructure, security, health and manufacturing. Thus, it is heralded as the next paradigm shift in technology that can exponentially spur growth and development.
Future Market Insights (FMI) has published a new market research report on cyber-physical systems. The report has been titled “Cyber-Physical System Market: Global Industry Analysis (2013-2017) and Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028).” With the lowering prices of devices such as sensors, several medium and small scale manufacturers and plant owners are shifting their focus towards the deployment of cyber-physical systems in order to convert them into smart factories. These types of cyber-physical systems not only help in eliminating errors that occur due to human intervention but also decrease the overall operational and production costs of a plant.
Speakers
Hans Vangheluwe
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Track: MPM4CPS
Hans Vangheluwe is a Professor in the Antwerp Systems and Software Modelling (AnSyMo) group within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where he is a founding member of the NEXOR Consortium on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). AnSyMo is a Core Research Lab of Flanders Make, the strategic research centre for the Flemish manufacturing industry. In a variety of projects, often with industrial partners, he develops and applies the model-based theory and techniques of Multi-Paradigm Modelling (MPM) in application domains as diverse as bio-actived sludge waste-water treatment plant design and optimization, safe automotive software, and autonomic production plants in the context of Industry 4.0.
His fundamental work covers the foundations of modelling and simulation, of model management, model transformation, and domain-specific (visual) modelling environments. This work is always accompanied by prototype tools such as PythonPDEVS, the Modelverse, T-Core, AToM^3 and AToMPM. In the mid '90s, he was one of the original members of the a-causal modelling language Modelica design team, one of the initiatives of the ESPRIT Basic Research Working Group 8467 on "simulation for the future: new concepts, tools and applications" (SiE) which he co-founded. More recently, he was the chair of the EU COST Action IC1404 "Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems" (MPM4CPS).
Samit Chattopadhyay
BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
Track: BioCPS
Currently he is holding prestigious Senior Professor & Shri B K Birla & Shrimati Sarala Birla Chair Professor position at the Department of Biological Sciences at BITS-Pilani, Goa Campus. In recent past, he was the Director, CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Jadavpur, Kolkata. Founding Director of advanced research at CSIR-IICB-TRUE (Translation Research Unit of Excellence), Salt Lake, Kolkata. Served as the Director, CSIR-NEIST (North East Institute of Science and Technology, Jorhat, Assam (additional charges). Setting up ambience for doing best research on disease and diagnostics. Bringing large number of mission mode projects and FTPs (Fast Track Projects) for immediate translatable products for India. Achievement towards developing application oriented research between Biology and Chemistry. Advanced knowledge in developing target based drugs taking challenges from basic science knowledge.
Didier Buchs
University of Geneva, Switzerland
Track: MPM4CPS
Didier Buchs obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Geneva in 1989. He was a researcher at 'Laboratoire de recherche en Informatique' of University of Paris Sud (Orsay) from 1989 to 1991 and the leader of the research team working on formal methods and concurrency at University of Geneva from 1991 to 1993. He has been a 'collaborateur scientifique' at the Software Engineering Laboratory of EPFL from 1993 (Adjoint Scientifique since 1997) to 2002 developing methods and tools for distributed embedded systems. He is now full professor of the faculty of science at the 'Centre Universitaire d'informatique' University of Geneva.
His current interest is principally on formal specification methods, validation techniques and testing techniques for real size distributed systems. These research topics produce a number of significant results such that the development of a specification language CO-OPN as well as its supporting environment CoopnBuilder (previously called SANDS, CoopnTools). Currently a model checker, called Alpina, for high level Petri nets is under development .
Vinay Kulkarni
Tata Consultancy Services Research
Track: ML4CPS
Vinay is a Distinguished Chief Scientist and Head of Software Systems Research at Tata Research Development Design Centre of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). His research interests include model-driven software engineering, self-adaptive systems, and enterprise modeling. His work in model-driven software engineering has led to a toolset that has been used to deliver several large business-critical systems over the past 20 years. Much of this work has found way into OMG standards, three of which Vinay contributed to in a leadership role. Recently, Vinay got inducted as Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering. An alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Vinay also serves as Visiting Professor at Middlesex University, London.
Divyasheel Sharma
ABB Corporate Research Lab
Track: ML4CPS
Divyasheel Sharma is a Senior Principal Scientist at ABB Corporate Research in Bangalore, India. He has received the Ph.D. degree in 2010 from the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA. For his PhD he worked on efficient information access in data-intensive sensor networks where he developed a Data Transmission Algebra (DTA), and a decentralized reinforcement learning based adaptive approach to deliver data. In 2010, he joined ABB Corporate Research, Bangalore, India, where he has been building industrial machine-learned systems.
Arend Rensink
University of Twente, Netherlands
Track: MPM4CPS
I am fascinated and inspired by how systems work, in their composition from small interacting building blocks. This has always applied to computer systems; more and more I also include organisational and social systems in my sphere of interest, in particular where it concerns the university educational system. After understanding why a system works, or doesn't work, the question of improvement arises. I usually do not take for granted that things must be the way they currently are, even after understanding why they are that way. Change, however, is not easily brought about: in software, the (lack of) maintainability stands in the way, in organisations it is typically inertia and lack of motivation for change.
The principle of Model-Driven Engineering is widely applicable and, indeed, widely applied. In consequence, collaborations and projects can be established in many places. This diversity is clearly reflected in the list of projects I am involved with: there are industrial collaborations and large European projects as well as more fundamental research projects
Sunil Bhand
BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
Track: BioCPS
Dr Sunil Bhand carried out his doctoral research on Industrial effluent analysis with reference to heavy metal speciation in aquatic environment and sediments in 1996. He worked as postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Pure and Applied Biochemistry, Lund University Sweden from 2001 to 2002. He has received significant funding and executed various national and international projects from CSIR, New Delhi, The Swedish Research Council, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Govt. of India, The World Bank USA, Department of Science & Technology, Defence Research and Development Organization and, Indo-UK UKIERI- DST.
He is currently leading a consortia project under National Agricultural Innovation Project, with multi-institute partners (BITS Pilani, IIT Delhi, NDRI Karnal, PU Patiala) with funding of INR. 32 crores (USD 5 MILLION) for the period Jan 2008-June 2014. He actively collaborates within and outside the country. He established a state of the art biosensor laboratory at Goa, India.
Santonu Sarkar
ABB Corporate Research Lab
Track: SE4CPS
Santonu Sarkar is associated with ABBCorporate Research (India) and an adjunct professor of Com-puter Sc and Information Systems BITS Pilani, K.K.Birla GoaCampus, India. Dr. Sarkar received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry in applied research, product and application development, architecture consulting for large software systems, project and client account management. His current research interest includes building software engineering techniques to ensure dependability, performance, and ease-of-use of Cloud and HPC applications. Dr. Sarkar has total of 15 granted patents and several publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences with h and i 10 indices of 20 and 17 respectively.
Susmita Ghosh
DiagnoRite Innovative Healthcare
Track: Startup4CPS
Susmita Ghosh is currently the director of the social techno-start-up, DiagnoRite Innovative Healthcare. She is also a consultant with the BITS Pilani BioNest. She completed her post-doctoral fellowship from Harvard Medical School and her PhD from University of Connecticut. She has received numerous grants, and was nominated in the Top 50 of the India Innovates Growth Program. Her research activities include healthcare products development (through research)t: developing hi tech, sensitive and reliable blood tests in affordable price, developing a novel molecular diagnostics platform for quick and reliable detection of drug resistance.
Etienne Borde
Telecom Paris, France
Track: SE4CPS
Etienne Borde is currently a researcher at LTCI (Telecom ParisTech) and an Associate Professor at Telecom ParisTech. His activities focus on software engineering for real-time embedded systems. His research interests are: component-based software engineering, architecture description languages, model transformation, code generation, and formal verification. In his research, Etienne applies and develops such techniques to improve design methods of real-time embedded systems. The results of this work has been published in prestigious international conferences
Soumyadip Bandyopadhyay
BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
Track: SE4CPS
Dr. Soumyadip Bandyopadhyay received the Ph.D degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2017. He had worked as a Junior Project Assistance in the VLSI Consortium project undertaken by the Advanced VLSI Design Laboratory, IIT Kharagpur from July 2008 to September 2012 and his current research interests include broadly formal methods in software engineering. He has published several research papers in different reputed international journals and conferences. He had received TCS Ph.D. Fellowship during his Ph.D. He was working as a Visiting Faculty at BITS Goa campus from September 2015 to 5th December 2016. From 6th December, 2016 to 31st July, 2017, he was working as an Assistant Professor in the same institute. From August 2017 to October 2018, he was working as a post doctoral fellow at System Analysis and Modeling group, Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany. From December to till date he is working as an assistant professor at BITS Pilani Goa Campus as well as an external post doctoral Fellow at Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany.
Dominique Blouin
Telecom Paris, France
Track: MPM4CPS
Dominique Blouin obtained an MSc in physics in 1994 from the University of British Columbia in Canada and a PhD in computer science in 2013 from the University of South-Brittany in France. He worked in industry for several years before he joined the Lab-STICC at the University of South-Brittany in 2008. After a post doc in the system analysis and modeling group of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany, he joined Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris as a permanent research engineer in 2016. He was the vice-chair of working group 1 on foundations for Multi-Paradigm Modeling for Cyber-Physical Systems during the European COST action IC 1404. He has been a member of the SAE AADL standardization committee since 2010 where he proposed the RDAL language, which inspired the ALISA (Architecture-led Incremental System Assurance) framework. His research interests are foundations for multi-paradigm modeling, model management, domain-specific languages and requirements engineering applied to cyber-physical systems development.
Swaroop Joshi
University of Utah, United States of America
Track: Edu4CPS
Dr. Swaroop Joshi is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. He earned his B.E. in Computer Engineering from NITK Surathkal, M.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay, and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University. His interest is in a range of topics in Education Technology and Software Engineering, including but not limited to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Active Learning, Game-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, Programming Languages, Compiler Design, and Mobile App Development. He is actively involved in Engineering and Computing Education Research and has presented papers in some leading conferences in these fields. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Engineering Education Transformation.
Vinayak Naik
BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
Track: ML4CPS
He is a Professor of Computer Science with the OPERA award in BITS Pilani at its Goa campus since 2018. He heads the Computer Science Department and Computing Center at the Goa campus. He is a member of the faculty at Anuradha and Prashanth Palakurthi Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (APPCAIR) at BITS Pilani. He is a Founding Member of BITS Goa Innovation, Incubation, and Entrepreneurship Society (BGIIES), an Adjunct Professor at IIIT Delhi, a member of the Committee to evaluate ICT requirements for Census 2021 formed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, a member of the Governing Council of IIPHG's NIDHI incubator for public health, a special advisor to McGraw-Hill Education, and a Chief Architect at BackPack. He is a founding member of the ACM SIGMOBILE chapter for India. He joined IIIT Delhi as an Assistant Professor in 2010. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2015. He was associated with IIIT until 2019. He was a Research Advisor to TCS. He spent the academic year of 2017-18 as a Visiting Associate Professor in the CSE department at IIT Bombay, the summer of 2016 as a Visiting Researcher with MNS group at MSR, Bangalore, and the summer of 2015 at VMware R&D.
Veeky Baths
BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
Track: BioCPS
Veeky Baths received his Ph.D. Degree in Science from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani,Rajasthan, India in the year 2011. Currently he is working as Associate Professor and heading the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at BITS, Pilani-K. K. Birla Goa Campus. He has received many Prestigious National and International research grants. He has 15 years of experience of teaching and research and has published many research articles in reputed conferences and journals. His research interests include Computational Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, Brain Computer Interface, Systems Biology, Biomedical and Neural Signal Processing, Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, Bioinformatics, Biological Sequence Analysis and Metabolic Network Analysis.
Hana Mkaouar
Telecom Paris, France
Track: MPM4CPS
Dr. Hana Mkaouar obtained an engineering degree in Computer Science in 2013 and a PhD in Computer Systems Engineering in 2019 from the National School of Engineers of Sfax (Tunisia). She is a postdoc reseacher at Telecom Paris (Paris, France) since November 2018. Her research interests focus on software engineering, model transformations, real-time systems, architecture description languages and formal verification.
Rima Al-Ali
Charles University, Czech Republic
Track: SE4CPS
Rima Al-Ali is a researcher at Department of Distributed and Dependable systems, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic where she defended her Ph.D. lately. Her research focus is on uncertainty in cyber-physical systems and self-adaptive systems. She was involved in a couple of EU projects during her studies, which are RELATE FP7 Marie Curie ITN and MPM4CPS ICT COST Action IC1404 projects.
Ashutosh Bhatia
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, India
Track: Edu4CPS
Ashutosh Bhatia received his B.E. degree in Computer Science from Barkatullah University, Bhopal, India, in 2000. From 2001-2005 he worked as a scientist in Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), India. He received his M.E. degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India, in 2007. From 2007-2010, he worked as research engineer in Samsung India Software Operations (SISO). During his stay in Samsung, he was also the member of MAC core committee of IEEE 802.15.6 standardization group, and also, patented a couple of methods related to the MAC protocol of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). He received his Ph.D degree from the Department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA) at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India. His research interests include building new designs, protocols, algorithms and theories that improve the security, performance and robustness of various networks and systems.
Panelists
Student Track
- Rakshit Mittal, BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
- Rochishnu Banerjee, BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India
Program Schedule
Organizing Committee
- Soumyadip Bandyopadhyay, Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa Campus
- Dominique Blouin, Telecom Paris
- Samit Chattopadhyay, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Goa Campus
- Rakshit Mittal, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Goa Campus
Feel free to contact: Rakshit Mittal (e-mail: raks0009@gmail.com)