Published June 30th, 2023
A paper entitled "FlipDyn: A game of resource takeovers in dynamical systems" was selected as the 2023 IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy's Best Student Paper Award. The paper was co-authored by Sandeep Banik (a graduate student) and Shaunak D. Bopardikar, Assistant Professor, ECE Department at MSU. The paper's citation is given below:
Sandeep Banik, Shaunak D. Bopardikar, "FlipDyn: A game of resource takeovers in dynamical systems", 2022 IEEE 61st Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp.2506-2511, 2022.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9992387
The paper was presented and published in the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control. Eligible papers for the award included all papers co-authored primarily by a graduate student in the area of security and privacy that appeared in the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and the 2022 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), two of the premier conferences in control theory.
Published April 30th, 2023
Rapid developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence in recent years have greatly advanced perception capabilities and thus the level of autonomy for machines, as evidenced by great strides made in autonomous vehicles and aerial drones over the last decade. These successes are due to advances in computing hardware and large datasets for training learning algorithms. However, for many real-world robotic applications, a robot’s environment may be so complex that no existing datasets are adequate, and synthetically generating high-fidelity data in simulation may not be possible. In collaboration with Todd Murphey from Northwestern University, ECE Professor Xiaobo Tan will use a new three-year, $397k NSF grant to advance active learning for robots, where the robots purposefully plan their motion and interaction with the environment to enable sensors to gather the most informative data. This award supports research to create algorithms for efficient robot active learning for perception and control of complex systems in highly dynamic and uncertain environments, such as the aquatic environment. The algorithm development effort will be supported by a running case study of autonomous aquatic debris removal using an unmanned surface vehicle equipped with soft sensor-rich robotic arms. Advances will have broad implications in applications of robotic technologies, such as aquatic debris cleanup, underwater search and rescue, and personalized minimally invasive robotic surgery.
Link to the award abstract: https://www.nsf.gov/
Published February 28th, 2023
Shaunak D. Bopardikar, an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will use a five-year $500,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award to create an integrated research and education program that will focus on the pressing need to make mobile dynamical systems, including autonomous vehicles, resilient – guaranteeing that they achieve their promised benefits, even under sensing, communication, and control attacks.
The envisioned benefits of autonomous vehicles (also called agents) such as self-driving cars and delivery drones are reduced roadway fatalities and congestion, and efficient last-mile delivery. However, the race to achieve autonomy in modern and future vehicles can make the vehicles increasingly susceptible to attacks on their sensors such as the onboard Global Positioning System (GPS) and the underlying control systems. Through the proposed research, Prof. Bopardikar plans to study the mathematical underpinnings of security problems arising in multi-agent systems and make these systems resilient to attacks. The educational plan includes creating a pool of activities based on innovative games related to attack resilience that will combine engineering and the arts for effective student engagement and personnel training. Outreach activities involving the public and law enforcement agencies will help shape future practices for root-cause analyses of security incidents and deter attacks.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Published February 28th, 2023
The College of Engineering at Michigan State University invites applications in all areas related to semiconductor science and engineering for up to four open-rank, tenure-system faculty positions. Candidates must have a doctorate in engineering or a closely-related science engineering discipline at the time of appointment, which will be available as of August 16, 2023. Please, click below for the complete job posting.
Published February 28th, 2023
Researchers in MSU’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department have published an article in a 2023 issue of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Materials Chemistry C that made the cover of the journal. The paper titled “Microfluidic thermal flow sensor based on phase-change material with ultra-high thermal sensitivity” was authored by Yungi Cao, Tongyu Wang, and ECE Professor Nelson Sepulveda. The paper describes the use of phase-change materials --VO2 in particular-- in a microfluidic gas flow sensor. The advantage of using this phase-change material (instead of traditional metals with high temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR)) is the extremely high sensitivity of VO2 with temperature across its phase transition. As an example of the impact on sensitivity, typical platinum or nickel metals used in commercially available devices have TCR values in the order of 7000 parts per million per degree Kelvin. This value for VO2 is more than 50 times greater.
Published February 28th, 2023
ECE Professor Nihar Mahapatra is the PI on a new $750k NSF Convergence Accelerator grant to investigate the experiences of people who stutter while interacting with automatic speech recognition systems (ASRs) and voice activated artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The multidisciplinary project team includes J. Scott Yaruss and Caryn Herring of MSU’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Ann Marie Ryan from MSU's Department of Psychology, and Hope Gerlach-Houck, from Western Michigan Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. Their project aims to resolve limitations in voice technology by developing and implementing policy-, advocacy-, and AI-based solutions to make voice technology accessible and fair to people who stutter. The project will contribute to advancing knowledge through development of inclusive training and test datasets as well as annotation for accessible automatic speech recognition (ASR) and development of novel ASR deep learning models. Proposed research studies will establish a convergent and holistic understanding of how the nature and experience of stuttering impacts and intersects with AI accessibility and fairness in voice-activated technology, identify barriers and facilitators of access to existing voice-activated AI among people who stutter, and evaluate the effectiveness of guidelines and audit tools.
Related links:
- NSF award announcement
- Article link (MSU Psychology): https://psychology.msu.edu/news-events/news/hey-siri-its-time-to-understand-stuttering.html
- Article link (MSU CommArtsSci): https://comartsci.msu.edu/about/newsroom/news/national-science-foundation-awards-csd-researchers-funding-revolutionize-ai
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