News

Rahul Mangharam is one of the recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Rahul was selected for inventing a new formal methodology to test and verify the correct operation of medical device software, saving lives and reducing care costs, the National Science Foundation said. The winners will receive their awards at a Washington, DC ceremony this spring. The Award will be presented by President Obama.

The 2016 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation is given to Rajeev Alur and David Dill for their invention of timed automata, a decidable model of real-time systems, which combines a novel, elegant, deep theory with widespread practical impact. Alur and Dill will receive the award at the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS), which was held on July 5-8, 2016, at Columbia University, New York City, USA.

Congratulations to David and Rajeev!

Interview with Rajeev Alur and David Dill is also available

Rahul Mangharam and Madhur Behl have won the Allegheny Region CleanTech Prize for their work on demand response advisor (DR advisor). The aim of the competition is to catalyze clean energy technology start-ups, support novel training and educational opportunities, and create a long-term sustained and diverse community to support clean energy student entrepreneurs in the Allegheny Region and beyond.

The competition took place during Carnegie Mellon University’s Energy Week, March 14-18, 2016. There were 16 teams from different universities in Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. 5 finalists were selected from the 16 teams to pitch for the winning prize. As winners of the competition, Rahul and Madhur received a $50,000 prize, and will compete for additional prizes at the national level competition held by the Department of Energy (DoE) and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) in June 2016.

The presented technology is a data-driven demand response recommendation engine called DR-Advisor. This technology is based on Madhur’s core dissertation research (he received his Ph.D. in December 2015, now he is a postdoctoral research fellow in ESE with Rahul).

Madhur Behl (final year PhD) won the Best-in-Session award (IoT Systems session) at the 2015 SRC TECHCON on September 22, 2015. This is for his TerraSwarm work on Data-driven Demand Response Recommender System [DR-Advisor].

Rishab Gupta and Paril Jain, first year EMBS students, won the first runners up (for best overall hack) at The Pennapps XII over Labor Day weekend (September 4-6, 2015).  They built a tool for measuring a person’s gait.

NSF and Intel announce a new, jointly funded large project on CPS security and privacy. The new project is centered at PRECISE and includes collaborators from the Penn medical school, law school, and sociology, as well as University of Michigan and Duke University.

Penn and IoT Article in Daily Pennsylvanian

Zhihao Jiang won the Best in Session Award for the System Design Tools session at SRC’s TECHCON in Austin, Texas, where he represented Penn’s TerraSwarm efforts.  He presented the paper titled “Integrated Functional and Formal Modeling for Closed-loop Evaluation of Medical Device Software”.

The University of Pennsylvania’s PRECISE Center has received a substantial financial gift from the Toyota InfoTechnology Center. Toyota-ITC is interested in promoting the PRECISE Center’s efforts on safety algorithms for self-driving cars, remote automotive diagnostics, resilient control of autonomous vehicles and electric vehicle architectures.

The following excerpt is from PennCurrent:

"With processing power and internet connectivity increasing, people don’t just learn how to use the latest in technology—that technology actually learns right back.

Your phone knows where you are, so it provides movie times and restaurant recommendations for places in walking distance. Your thermostat knows what time you get home and what temperature you’d like your house to be when you get there. Your TV has your favorite shows recorded because it knows what you like. And all of these devices can now talk to one another to learn even more about their users."