Speaker explains research into cyber-physical systems

Jim Kurose of the University of Massachusetts Amherst spoke at a colloquium sponsored by the School of Informatics and Computing on Friday titled, “Cyber-physical systems: linking sensing, networking, computation and people.”

Kurose is currently the executive associate dean of the College of Natural Sciences and a distinguished university professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Minaxi Gupta, associate professor of computer science in the School of Informatics and Computing, introduced Kurose as a distinguished researcher in computer networks and author of one of the two most widely used course textbooks for senior/graduate computer network courses around the world.

“Actually, it’s the best selling textbook,” Kurose said.

“Anything physically connected to the Internet is a cyber-physical system,” Gupta said.

Friday’s colloquium focused on the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere.
CASA is funded by the National Science Foundation and seeks to revolutionize the way we observe, detect and predict atmospheric phenomena by creating distributed collaborative adaptive sensor networks that sample the atmosphere where and when end-user needs are greatest, according to the NSF website.

NEXRAD, or next-generation radar, is currently being used as the U.S. weather sensing system, according to Kurose.

“They just sit and spin,” he said.

This causes a sensing gap, according to Kurose, which means the earth curvature effects prevent 72 percent of the troposphere below 1 kilometer from being observed. Members of CASA said they want a dense network of inexpensive, low power, short-range radars to sense the lower 3 kilometers of earth’s atmosphere to provide a finer spatial resolution.

“Flooding, in terms of loss of life and property, is more destructive than tornados,” Kurose said. “The ability to do this kind of prediction can absolutely save lives and property.”

“The really big picture I took away was the importance of the end-user,” he said.
End-users such as the National Weather Service, emergency responders and researchers want to observe, understand, predict and respond, but Kurose said this can’t always happen simultaneously.

“It’s not about meteorological sensing, it’s about the end-user,” Kurose said. “I hope you walk away knowing the importance of people.”