Art Museum Reception Monday Evening
(event flyer in PDF, DOC)

We are pleased to invite all registered attendees of the CPSWeek workshops and conferences to a reception at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm on Monday April 21, 2008.

The reception will feature drinks and appetizers as well as a chance to walk through the museum's collection and to interact with your colleagues. We are grateful to the sponsors of this special event: the School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS) at UC Berkeley.

How to get to (and from) the reception: walk from the Renaissance Grand Hotel to the Convention Center Station of the Metrolink light rail system and please make sure to take a Westbound train bound for Shrewsbury (not for the airport) to the Skinker Station (on the way back you can take any Eastbound train) and walk to the art museum.

Plenary Talks    

• Title: "Distributed Smart Cameras" by Dr. Wayne Wolf, Georgia Institute of Technology
  
  A distributed smart camera system uses distributed algorithms to combine information from physically distributed cameras to analyze a scene. As such, they combine facets of high-performance embedded systems and sensor networks. This talk will motivate the need for distributed smart camera systems and describe two example systems, one for gesture recognition and one for tracking, designed by our group; 
   
• Title: "Development of a Self-Driving Car as a Mobile Sensing Platform" by Dr. Seth Teller, MIT
  
  In May 2006 we formed a team to compete in DARPA's 2006-2007 "Urban Challenge," the goal of which was to develop a passenger vehicle capable of safe, robust autonomous driving in city traffic. Over the following eighteen months, we built the team up to roughly twenty-five members, acquired more than a half-million dollars worth of sensors and mobile computers and data storage systems, assembled two autonomous vehicles, wrote (and discarded) hundreds of thousands of lines of new code, and tested our system extensively in various closed and public road networks around the country.
  
  This talk surveys some of the issues that arose in the project, including systems design, sensor choice, environment/surround representation, codification of driving rules, algorithm development, and testing methods. We'll show lots of real data, and examples of our algorithms doing reasonable and not-so-reasonable things. We will describe our experiences through the final stages of the competition. Finally, we'll attempt to identify some of the lessons we learned from the project. In particular, we will contrast two divergent approaches in the robotics community to the development of autonomous vehicles, one centered on persistent data infrastructure, the other on just-in-time mobile sensing;
   
• Title: "Cyber-Physical Systems Research Challenges" by Dr. Jeannette M. Wing, Carnegie Mellon University and NSF
  
  More and more of our daily routine will invisibly rely on digital technology that interfaces with the physical world. From smart cars to embedded medical devices to earthquake-sensitive buildings, these cyber-physical systems are complex systems that our lives depend on. Can we engineer these systems to have predictable behavior? What new science is needed to model and understand cyber-physical systems? 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.

Invited Talk

• "Designing Future Systems for Airworthiness Certification: A Look at Mixed Criticality Architecture Requirements"
  by David Homan (AFRL Air Vehicles Directorate), Paul Miner (NASA Langley Research Center), and Brad Martin (National Security Agency)