(a) SmartMart: IoT-based In-store Mapping for Mobile Devices (Dr. Byron J. Gao)

Quite often, when shopping in a supermarket (e.g. Walmart), shoppers are frustrated at locating the items on the shopping list and no assistance is available. On the other hand, retailers lose about 20% of sales as a result. The objective of this project is to leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technology to make store items "smart" so that they can automatically register and update their location information, allowing shoppers to search, locate, and map them on the store floor plan using mobile devices. Advanced features include recommending routes, computing shortest paths for multiple items on the shopping list, and facilitating exploratory search and personalized search capacities.

(b) Integration of IoT Devices and Tools for Sleep Disorder Assessment (Dr. Vangelis Metsis)

Sleep disorders can lead patients to sleep deprivation, which in turn can cause daytime fatigue, loss of concentration and productivity, and possible accidents. It is estimated that 70 million people in the USA have a sleep disorder, the vast majority of which remain undiagnosed and untreated. The current standard in sleep disorder detection and assessment has high cost, and requires the patient to spend one or more nights at a specialized sleep lab, hooked up to monitors through wired invasive sensors connected to various parts of the human body. The data collected, then, have to be manually examined by the physicians. New wireless devices (e.g. Smartphones, Sensors, Kinect, etc.) and tools, modeled as IoT objects, can be used to provide a non-invasive alternative, that can be self-administered by patients at home, and can automate the data collection and analysis process. The aim of this project is to create a middleware that can be used to integrate a set of such devices, and allow for seamless data acquisition from a heterogeneous collection of devices coming from different vendors.

(c) Flexible IoT Management Platform (Dr. Anne Ngu)

While Internet of Things (IoT) offers numerous exciting potentials and opportunities, it remains challenging how to effectively manage things to achieve seamless integration of the physical world and the virtual one. In this project, we investigate an interesting direction, establishing a context-aware management framework that smoothly socialize things through Twitter, Facebook and comprehensively manage them in an effective and user-friendly way. We plan to design and implement a variety of IoT application such as smart home, smart health and smart cities prototypes to showcase the framework. We also plan to provide a workbench with a set of tools, supporting streamlined deployment of such prototypes and their convenient maintenance, development, and extension.

(d) Testing and Verification of Mobile Apps (Dr. Guowei Yang)

The use of mobile platform becomes increasingly ubiquitous, and mobile platform has overtaken traditional desktop platform in Internet usage in 2014. This leads to an increasing impetus for ensuring the reliability of applications (apps) that run on mobile platform. However, testing mobile apps is complex and expensive, often requiring substantial manual effort, due to physical constraints of mobile devices as well as special characteristics of mobile apps. The objective of this project is developing efficient and effective techniques and tools for testing apps on Google Android platform, which is the most popular mobile OS and open source. We plan to study the critical properties to test for Android apps, develop techniques and tools for systematically checking these properties, using a combination of static analysis and dynamic analysis, and apply the tools on open source Android apps for evaluating their effectiveness.

(e) Design and Verification of IoT Systems (Dr. Rodion Podorozhny)

Increasingly, the design of modern reasoning control systems for teams of reconnaissance and combat unmanned vehicles rely on ad-hoc, self-healing networks. The nature of such systems require specialized methods of design and verification to automate and shorten the development time and verify the properties specific to these systems to increase their software reliability.

This project will focus on distributed scheduling as an algorithmic approach for the reasoning component of the control system. Such an approach has certain benefits. For instance, it can allow several robots to coordinate and dynamically adjust their actions to create, as a team, future situations necessary to achieve a certain common goal.

The project will have three main aspects: development and evaluation of the distributed reasoning component for a cyber-physical system with communication via internet, a control system of an individual robot and a hybrid verification system for a scheduling based reasoning component.

The perceived novelty of the suggested hybrid verification system is its ability to verify that scheduling commitments of robots are indeed fulfilled in the future and verify thread safety of critical shared data structures: hierarchical task networks and schedules.

To accomplish these tasks we will use a simulation, a team of two-track rovers and electrically powered model planes. The control system will use Android-based cellphones as embedded devices on board rovers and model planes that will communicate via Wi-Fi.