Enhancing resource availability, health, security, and a sense of well-being can be enhanced by our ability to sense, analyze, and act on our world with efficient, safe, and secure engineered systems. To realize such systems requires a deep understanding of the interfaces between the cyber and physical worlds, leading to the establishment of the field of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). While CPS as a discipline and application-enabler has evolved tremendously over the past decade, current graduate training does not sufficiently prepare students for fundamental discovery and innovation in CPS nor for effective translation of research to application development. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Virginia (UVA) will address this need by training graduate students to pursue fundamental CPS discovery and innovation and to collaborate with application domain experts to realize a smarter planet, specifically in the areas of smart health, smart cities, and autonomous systems. The traineeship anticipates training one hundred fifty-eight (158) master's and doctoral students, including thirty-three (33) funded PhD trainees, from civil and environmental engineering, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mechanical and aerospace engineering, and systems and information engineering.
Current CPS graduate training is lacking in three critical ways that will be addressed in this project. First, current courses do not instill the integrative knowledge needed for new scientific discovery and translational applications in the field of CPS. Second, most students do not have a sufficiently robust experience of convergence activities as part of their training. This lack exists not only in traditional engineering and computing education but also extends into analyses of target application domains and associated grand challenges. Third, explicit professional development is absent in most graduate training. Such exposure is critical in CPS given the field's potent role in our ever-evolving smart world, and CPS practitioners must attend to social issues regarding ethics, safety, privacy, communication, and policy. This traineeship will address these issues and drive CPS graduate education nationwide by developing a novel, comprehensive graduate training program that involves orientation, normalization modules, elective courses, experiential convergence research activities, professional development workshops, and a hands-on, testbed-driven educational curriculum. Students will acquire both the technical depth and the integrative transdisciplinary understanding of CPS and its associated application domains to be successful in CPS-related careers. During their time in the program, trainees will engage in transdisciplinary CPS research on projects related to challenges in smart health, smart cities, and autonomous systems. These research efforts have the potential for significant scientific and application impact, such that a smarter world can be achieved and associated societal grand challenges can be addressed.
The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
