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Developing In-Home Rehab CarePg 8

ENGINEERING AT ILLINOISCOORDINATED SCIENCE LAB: NEWSLETTER

Building NICER Robots for Aging PopulationPg 9

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WINTER 2016 CSL: COORDINATED SCIENCE LAB

SECURING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

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News BriefsPg 4

Securing the Nation’s Critical InfrastructurePg 6

In-Home Rehab TechnologyPg 8

NICER Robots for Aging PopulationPg 9

Smart Watch Vulnerable to HackingPg 10

$6.25M Multimodal Data Analysis InitiativePg 11

:CONTENTS

Managing Editor Kim Gudeman

Contributing WritersKatie CarrMike KoonAugust Schiess Tom Moone

DesignWinter Agency

Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please send them to kgudeman@illinois.edu.

WINTER 2016

Coordinated Science LabCollege of EngineeringUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

csl.illinois.edu

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DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE: KLARA NAHRSTEDT2015 was a year of “big”: big centers, big data, and big initiatives.

Since July, the University of Illinois—under the leadership of ITI Director David Nicol—has received more than $42 million in federal funding to design more secure and resilient cyber systems for critical infra-structure, including the power grid, oil and gas pipelines, hydro plants, first response systems, and more. Those grants have established two multi-university initiatives led by Illinois: The Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute, funded by the Dept. of Homeland Security and shared with Illinois’ Applied Research Institute; and the Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium, funded by the Dept. of Energy. Both are major centers with the potential to impact the cybersecurity field in years to come.

In addition, CSL collaborated with NCSA to propose and win one of four regional big data hubs funded by the National Science Foundation. The Midwest Big Data Hub, called SEEDcorn, covers 12 states and is pro-viding a framework for collaboration that will enable future breakthroughs in everything from agriculture to manufacturing. We also expect to play a role in the Big Data Spokes projects that will accompany the SEEDcorn initiative. The goal is to position Illinois as a major player in big data, with the expertise in both basic science research and applied research to transform many fields.

CSL faculty also have played important roles in several significant initiatives, such as intelligent robotics and health IT.

Naira Hovakimyan, the director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at CSL, has received multiple grants for her work designing “friendly” robots that could assist an aging population. Tim Bretl is collaborating with colleagues in civil and environmental engineering on technology that will improve the safety of mobile cranes, and is working with Soon-Jo Chung and Seth Hutchinson to build robotic bats for monitoring con-struction sites.

In the health IT area, T. Kesavadas is working on new technology that will help doctors and physical therapists treat remote therapy patients. In addition, the Health Care Engineering Systems Center recently installed the Raven II, an open-source surgical robot that will allow future doctors to acquire hands-on training in robotic surgery without the use of a patient.

Also, CSL continues to further its relationships with industry. SONIC, which is celebrating its third year as a STARnet center, held its annual meeting with record participation from industry and government, according to director Naresh Shanbhag. Also, two proposed NSF I/UCRC initiatives led by CSL faculty had large turn-outs to their planning meetings: The Center for Computational Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine, led by CSL’s Ravi Iyer and Gene Robinson, drew 40 industry representatives to its planning meeting in March; and the Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML), led by Elyse Rosenbaum, wel-comed representatives of more than two dozen companies and organizations to its meeting in November.

We are proud of our researchers, without whom these “big” achievements wouldn’t be possible. Please take a few minutes to learn more about them in the following pages.

Klara Nahrstedt

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HOVAKIMYAN W. GRAFTON AND LILLIAM B. WILKINS PROFESSOR AND 2015 SWE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD CSL Professor Naira Hovakimyan was named the next W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor by the De-partment of Mechanical Science and Engineering. Hovakimyan’s research focuses on robotics, game theory, networks of autonomous systems, and theory of robust adaptive control and estimation. Hovakimyan also received the Society of Women Engineers 2015 Achievement Award—the society’s highest honor. The award recognizes Hovakimyan’s significant contributions to mathematical control theory and its application in safety-critical systems.

ITI researchers Varun Badrinath Krishna, Gabe Weaver and Bill Sanders have received the Best Paper Award for their work on smart meter security at the 12th Interna-tional Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems. The paper, “PCA-Based Method for Detecting Integrity Attacks on Advanced Metering Infrastructure,” pro-poses combining two unsupervised learning methods in a unique way to help verify intrusion attempts on smart meters, which use Internet-based communications net-works to report data that helps improve power delivery service.

SHA NASA ADVISORY COUNCILCSL Professor Lui Sha has been appointed to the Aeronautics Committee of the NASA Advisory Council. He will serve on this Committee from 2015 to 2017. In this role, he will advise Charles Bolden, Administrator of NASA, on NASA’s research programs. Sha, a professor of computer science, was selected based largely on his body of work in the area of safety critical real-time systems. His work enabled the development of the real-time computing system for the International Space Station.

SMART METER RESEARCH AWARDS : QEST 2015

SRIKANT INFOCOM AWARDSINFOCOM, IEEE’s conference focusing on research into computer and data communica-tion networks, awarded the Best Paper Award to CSL Professor R. Srikant, and also named him for its Career Achievement Award. The paper focuses on an algorithm that sorts data efficiently into servers that process the data. Generally, Srikant researches and models computer networks and cloud computing systems, in particular TCP con-gestion control, wireless scheduling, P2P modeling, and social and economic networks.

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:NEWS BRIEFS:CONNECT

Five Engineering at Illinois research groups—all of which included CSL and ITI researchers—were among 24 worldwide engineering and computer sci-ence teams whose proposals were included in the inaugural grants for the Siebel Energy Institute (SEI). The winning research proposals, led by engineering and computer science experts from SEI’s member universities, will accelerate the development of algorithms and machine learning to improve the performance of modern energy systems.

ZACHARY ESTRADA FUTURE FACULTY FELLOWSHIPFor the second year in a row, Zachary Estrada, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Illinois and researcher in CSL, was awarded the Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship achievement. The award supports students interested in pursuing a faculty career in the fu-ture. Estrada works in CSL Professor Ravi Iyer’s lab, and his primary research interests involve computer security and reliability, particularly in cloud computing, as well as the challenges that arise when moving to a cloud environment.

SIEBEL ENERGY INSTITUTE PROJECT WINS

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: SECURING THE NATION’S CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

CREATING A MORE SECURE CLOUD

Increased strength in cybersecurity helps keep data safe from at-tack, damage, or unauthorized access. The Information Trust Institute, housed in CSL, has been at the forefront of such research.

In the past year alone, ITI has received nearly $44 million in cyberse-curity-related funding from the federal government. The funds created two initiatives in the last year—the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute, a Dept. of Homeland Security-funded effort to enhance the resiliency of the nation’s critical infrastructures; and Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium, funded by the Dept. of Energy to create more secure and resilient energy delivery systems for the electric and oil & gas industries.

As risk associated with cybersecurity continues to develop and evolve with changing technology, Illinois researchers will continue to pave the way to more advanced technologies and methodologies that protect our critical infrastructures.

Illinois researchers are leading the design of more secure and resilient systems

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has awarded a new $2 million grant to the Assured Cloud Computing University Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Center, which began in 2011 with $4 million from AFRL and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, focuses on advancing secure cloud computing science and technologies.

The Center develops technology for assured, mission-critical cloud computing across “blue” and “gray” networks that ensures the confi-dentiality and integrity of data and communications, job completion in the presence of cyber attacks and failures, and timely completion of jobs to meet mission requirements.

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CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE INSTITUTE (CIRI)The University of Illinois is leading a new center formed to improve the resiliency of critical infrastructure, which includes dams, information technology, emergency services, transportation systems and critical manufacturing. The Critical Infra-structure Resilience Institute (CIRI) is funded through a grant—anticipated at $20 million over five years—from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The Center, a consortium of academic and industry institutions, will focus on issues related to improving the ability of criti-cal infrastructures to prepare for and recover from disruptions caused by deliberate attacks, accidents, and naturally occur-ring threats or incidents. The Center has a particular emphasis on business and policy issues that confront the industries that run and support critical infrastructures.

“Critical infrastructure systems are susceptible to catastrophic interruptions, whether it’s from natural or malicious causes,” said David Nicol, director of ITI and the principal investigator. Our goal is to address the systematic challenges we face in making sure that infrastructures that modern life depends on continue to work, even in the face of disruptions.”

CIRI’s first projects will be conducted at Illinois, Stanford University, Northeastern University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, and University of Washington.

SECURING CORPORATE NETWORKS THROUGH START-UP TOOLIllinois cybersecurity start-up Network Perception is preparing to launch a new software solution, called NP-Live, in the marketplace next year. NP-Live provides continuous monitoring of a company’s network and can be used in many sectors, including energy. The tool makes it easier to detect vulnerabilities that can lead to security breaches. It helps analyze how traffic moves from a trusted zone (e.g., networks that support critical infrastructure) to an untrusted zone (e.g., a corpo-rate network that connects to the Internet).

“These tools can alert IT professionals if the traffic flow patterns deviate from the baseline,” said CEO Robin Berthier, a research scientist in the Information Trust Institute.

CYBER RESILIENT ENERGY DELIVERY CONSORTIUM (CREDC) The U.S. Department of Energy selected the University of Illinois to lead a five-year, $28.1 million initiative that will develop cyber resilient energy delivery systems for the electric power and oil and gas industries. The DOE is contributing $22.5 mil-lion, with $5.6 million in recipient cost-share.

The Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (CREDC), which consists of 11 universities and national laboratories, will focus on improving the resilience and security of the cyber networks that serve as the backbone of the infrastructure that delivers energy to the nation—known as energy delivery systems (EDS)—such as power grid and pipeline systems.

“Our consortium will focus on making energy delivery systems resilient to cyber-anomalies, whether accidental or from malicious intent,” said David Nicol, CSL professor and the principal investigator. “The challenge is that increased efficiencies and capabilities in energy delivery rely on greater use of computers and communication networks, which simultaneously raises the potential for serious problems. We need to be able to integrate advanced cyber components with the assurance that we aren’t making systems more vulnerable.”

The consortium includes researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Rutgers Univer-sity, Tennessee State University, the University of Houston, and Washington State University.

THESE TOOLS CAN ALERT IT PROFESSIONALS IF THE TRAFFIC FLOW PATTERNS DEVIATE FROM THE BASELINE. -ROBIN BERTHIER“

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“

“YOUR THERAPIST WILL SEE YOU NOW”

CSL researchers are developing a new system for in-home rehab care.

In the future, the occupational therapist helping patients relearn how to use a fork fol-lowing a stroke might be a computer.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Buf-falo are developing new technology that could assist stroke victims and others with oc-cupational and physical therapy at home. The project, “Cognitive Haptic-Based Rehabilita-tion System for Patient-Centric Home,” is funded by the National Science Foundation at $708,000 for three years.

“When people go back home after a stroke, they are rarely monitored and often decline in abilities,” said Thenkurussi (Kesh) Kesavadas, director of the Health Care Engineering Systems Center at Illinois and a professor of industrial and enterprise systems engineer-ing. “Our primary goal is to use very advanced technology to help people do fine-motor rehab at home.”

Researchers in the Coordinated Science Lab are developing a system based on haptics, the process of recognizing objects through touch. The team is working to create a low-cost model that can help enforce proper technique through exercises, which will be designed using data collected by analyzing the motion of healthy subjects. In particular, the work will target fine motor skills—which usually involves synching the hand and fingers to make small movements—over gross motor skills, which are less challenging to rehabilitate.

The system will have three main components: a hardware platform, a remote-access inter-face so that an off-site therapist can monitor progress and modify the therapy regimen as needed, and a brain-machine interface that allows the system to adapt itself to the pa-tient’s level of effort based on cognitive measurement. The same approach could be used in other applications as well, such as helping children with dysgraphia learn how to write.

“This technology could really help assist in teaching any fine motor skill through repeti-tion of movement,” Kesavadas said.

RAVEN II ROBOT:AN OPEN-SOURCE SURGICAL ROBOT

This summer, CSL Professor Kesh Kesavadas and the Health Care Engineering Systems Center welcomed RAVEN II, the Robot-Assisted Tele-Surgery for Tele-Health, to its lab. Ra-ven will allow future doctors hands-on training in robotic surgery without the use of a patient. It’s one of the first steps that will link cutting-edge medical research already taking place on campus with the engineering-based College of Medicine, opening in 2018.

Photo credit: Mike Koon, College of Engineering

:COMING SOON TO A PC NEAR YOU

THIS TECHNOLOGY COULD REALLY HELP ASSIST IN TEACHING ANY FINE MOTOR SKILL THROUGH REPETITION OF MOVEMENT. -KESH KESAVADAS

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A team of researchers from CSL aim to develop mobile robots that we can integrate into our daily lives—requiring a level of familiarity and comfort not normally associated with robots. To work toward this goal, NICER, or Non-Intrusive Coopera-tive Empathetic Robots, was established this summer with a $12,000 Focal Point grant from the Graduate College of En-gineering.

Robots have the potential to benefit humans in the workplace and home—they could help seniors with daily living tasks, for example—but to accomplish that, humans must trust robots to help and not harm them.

“Cooperation and coordination is the key to bringing current robots closer to humans. This can only be done by studying the psychol-ogy aspects that lie behind this interaction,” Thiago Marinho, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, said.

To explore the relationship between these flying robots and hu-mans, the team created a virtual environment scenario. The re-search is taking place at the Coordinated Science Lab and at the

Beckman Institute’s Illinois Simulator Lab (ISL). ISL has a high-tech virtual reality facility known as the Cube, where the researchers can safely collect experimental data.

NICER requires the involvement of not only computer science and engineering departments, but those of psychology and human fac-tors as well.

“This project is important because it can identify how tolerant hu-mans are to the robots we have been developing,” said Marinho. “Once we understand how the human is affected psychologically by these flying robots, we will be able to program their brains to aid the human in the best possible way without disrupting the human’s comfort.”

Marinho is working on the project alongside Venanzio Cichella, grad-uate student in mechSE; Naira Hovakimyan, professor of mechSE; Frances Ranxiao Wang, professor of psychology; Camille Goude-seune, a computer systems analyst at the Beckman Institute; Kasey Ackerman, graduate student in mechSE; and Ishaan Pakrasi, under-graduate student in mechSE.

HOVAKIMYAN DESIGNS “FRIENDLY” ROBOTS TO HELP WITH DAILY LIVING TASKS

DELIVERING FRESHLY CUT LAWNS WITH LITTLE SET-UP

Along with doing the laundry and taking out the trash, mowing the lawn is an inescapable chore. But CSL researchers are making it possible to circumvent the whole job.

Junho Yang, a PhD candidate at Illinois in mechanical science and engineering, alongside Professor Soon-Jo Chung (Aerospace Engineering), Professor Seth Hutchinson (ECE) and agriculture implement manufacturer John Deere, is working on an omni-directional-vision-based system for robotic lawnmowers. The new system would enable homeowners to bypass the burdensome process of setting up “boundaries” for the lawnmowers—an advancement over robotic lawnmowers currently in the marketplace.

NICER ROBOTS

Using a homegrown app on a Samsung Gear Live smart watch, researchers were able to guess what a user was typing through data “leaks” produced by the motion sensors on smart watches. The project, called Motion Leaks through Smartwatch Sensors, or MoLe, has privacy implications, as an app that is camouflaged as a pedometer, for example, could gather data from emails, search queries, and other confidential documents.

“While the device’s contact to the human body will offer invaluable in-sights into human health and context, it will also make way for deeper violation into human privacy,” said Romit Roy Choudhury, associate pro-fessor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois.

The app uses an accelerometer and gyroscope to track the micro-motion of keystrokes as a wearer types on a keyboard. After collecting the sensor data, researchers ran it through a “Keystroke Detection” module, which analyzed the timing of each keystroke and the net 2D displacement of the watch. For example, the left wrist moves farther to type a “T” than an “F.”

While Illinois researchers developed MoLe, it is conceivable that hackers could build a similar app and deploy it to iTunes and other libraries, where users could unknowingly download it to their devices.

SONICIn its third year, the SONIC Center—which is designing robust, energy efficient, and intelligent computing platforms for na-noscale devices—has posted some impressive achievements, which includes setting a world-record in the energy-efficiency of a chip-to-chip interconnect. The Center, whose director is Na-resh Shanbhag, celebrated its achievements at its annual review meeting Sept. 30-Oct. 1 in Champaign.

CAEMLMore than two dozen companies sent representatives to the Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML) Planning Meeting on Nov. 2-3 at Illinois. Led by Elyse Rosenbaum, CAEML is a proposed NSF I/UCRC that aims to apply emerging machine-learning techniques to microelectronics and micro-systems modeling.

ALLERTONCSL co-hosted the 53rd Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing on Sept. 30-Oct. 2. The conference drew 477 people to the Allerton Park and Retreat Center, with Profes-sor Martin Vetterli of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne delivering the keynote address.

GOT A SMART WATCH? HACKERS COULD GET YOUR DATA.

Like all computer devices, smart watches are vulnerable to hackers, say CSL researchers.

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A CSL-led research team has received a $6.25 million Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award to develop a new information theory for data collection, analysis, and decision-making.

The research aims to speed up and improve our ability to collect and analyze data and subsequently adapt our decisions as new information comes in. Applications range from social network analysis to interactive machine learning with humans in the loop, such as brain computer/robot interfaces (BCI/BRI) or crowdsourcing.

The grant will allow Negar Kiyavash (associate professor of industrial and enterprise systems engineering and electrical and computer engineering) and her team to make advancements related to the non-commutative information structures that are intrinsic to hierarchical representations, distributed sensing, and adaptive online processing. In non-commutative information structures, the knowledge extracted from the data is dependent on the order of operations and direction of information flow.

“In traditional decision-making, you gather all the information and then make a deci-sion,” said Kiyavash, principal investigator on the project. “With adaptive exploitation, we’re fine-tuning our decision-making as we get in new information.”

ILLINOIS LEADS $6.25M INITIATIVE FUNDED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

MULTIMODAL DATA ANALYSIS

“ IN TRADITIONAL DECISION-MAKING, YOU GATHER ALL THE INFORMATION AND THEN MAKE A DECISION.-NEGAR KIYAVASH

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