News

A very warm congratulations to Mayur, Saswat Anand, Mary Jean Harrold, and Hongseok Yang! Their paper titled "Automated Concolic Testing of Smartphone Apps" was selected for the ESEC/FSE 2022 Test of Time Award.  This is a great recognition of the outstanding and impactful work he's doing!

Radoslav Ivanov, Taylor J. Carpenter, James Weimer, Rajeev Alur, George J. Pappas, and Insup Lee won ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) Best Paper Award at ESWeek 2022. Their paper addresses the problem of verifying the safety of autonomous systems with neural network (NN) controllers; and provides evaluations on four benchmarks.

Congratulations on your well-deserved achievement!

ACM SIGBED established the Distinguished Leadership Awards to recognize individuals who have exemplary and substantive leadership in leading and implementing activities over the communities relevant to SIGBED at regional, national, and/or international level.

PRECISE Director, Insup Lee, was named the recipient of the ACM SIGBED Inaugural Distinguished Leadership Award this year for his leadership in promoting cross-fertilization of ACM and IEEE communities in Cyber-Physical Systems, Embedded Systems, and Real-Time Systems.

Warmest congratulations to Insup!

PRECISE Faculty, Linh Thi Xuan Phan, will be collaborating with an international team of researchers that will work to unify the design of software and hardware components in cyber-physical transportation systems.

This five-year, $5.7 million project, is being funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and will be led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It will feature collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley; Vanderbilt University; the University of Colorado, Boulder; the Norwegian University of Science Technology and Italy’s IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca.

A major goal of this research is to help self-driving cars and other autonomous transportation systems achieve increased efficiency and performance, as well as better safety guarantees.

Yahan Yang, Ramneet Kaur, Souradeep Dutta, and Insup Lee won the Best Paper Award at the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS 2022). Below is the title and abstract for their paper.

"Interpretable Detection of Distribution Shifts in Learning Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems"

Deep neural networks have allowed us to use high dimensional real world signals generated from sensors like camera and LiDAR. However, this  comes with its potential perils. The pitfalls arise from possible over-fitting, and subsequent unsafe behavior when exposed to unknown environments. In this paper, our proposal is to build good representations for in-distribution data. We introduce the idea of a memory bank to store prototypical samples from the input space. We use these memories to compute     probability density estimates using kernel density estimation techniques. We evaluate our technique on two challenging scenarios :  a self-driving car setting implemented inside the simulator CARLA with image inputs, and an autonomous racing car navigation setting, with LiDAR inputs. An added benefit of using training samples as memories to detect out-of-distribution inputs is that the system is interpretable to a human operator. Explanation of this nature is generally hard to obtain from pure deep learning based alternatives.  

Congratulations on your well-deserved achievement!

We’re thrilled to announce our newest postdoc, Kuk Jang, is joining PRECISE!

Kuk recently completed his doctorate in the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department and has been working with Dr. Rahul Mangharam in mLab since 2014. His research interests include domain adaptation and reinforcement learning for medical and robotics applications.

Kuk will be working with Drs. Insup Lee and Jim Weimer on data design for robust machine learning in our “MURI” and “Smart Alarms 2.0” projects. We are glad he decided to extend his time at Penn and look forward to seeing his continued contributions.

Welcome, Kuk!

Alan Ismaiel, Ivan Ruchkin, Jason Shu, Oleg Sokolsky, and Insup Lee won the Best Contributed Theoretical Paper Award at the 54th Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2021). Below is the title and abstract for their paper:

Title: Data Generation with PROSPECT: a Probability Specification Tool

Abstract: Stochastic simulations of complex systems often rely on sampling dependent discrete random variables. Currently, their users are limited in expressing their intention about how these variables are distributed and related to each other over time. This limitation leads the users to program complex and error-prone sampling algorithms. This paper introduces a way to specify, declaratively and precisely, a temporal distribution over discrete variables. Our tool PROSPECT infers and samples this distribution by solving a system of polynomial equations. The evaluation on three simulation scenarios shows that the declarative specifications are easier to write, 3x more succinct than imperative sampling programs, and are processed correctly by PROSPECT. 

Congratulations on your well-deserved achievement!

StrokeDetectAI, a Python library for detecting onset of asymmetric movement in hospitalized patients with risk factors of stroke and those with no baseline asymmetric upper extremity weakness, has officially been licensed to Neuralert! This is a technology developed out of our Assured Autonomy and Smart Alarms projects.

PRECISE received an award from the National Science Foundation on their proposal entitled "Active sensing and personalized interventions for pandemic-induced social isolation". 

Social connections are essential for individuals' health and the growth of a community. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated the problems of social isolation, depriving older adults of their personal interactions with peers and often even with caregivers. Academic researchers (Teruo Higashino, Hajime Nagahara, Teruhiro Mizumoto, Viktor Erdlyi, Manabu Ikeda, Mamoru Hashimoto and Yasuyuki Gondo) from Osaka University and the PRECISE center at the University of Pennsylvania will partner together to develop a technology platform and tools to facilitate re-engagement of community members at high risk for social isolation in the US and in Japan. This project is a joint collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the Japan Science and Technology Agency. 

We are proud to share that Xiayan Ji and Shuo Li have been selected as one of the finalists in the Wells Fargo Campus Analytics Challenge. During the competition, they were provided with a large dataset and instructions to develop a machine learning model to predict suspected elder fraud in the digital payments space.

Congratulations!