IUCRC Proposal Phase I University of Colorado Boulder: Center for Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI)

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the ecosystem of computing devices (e.g. cellphones, household appliances, vehicles, etc.) connected to each other via the internet. The goal of the Center is to enable the next generation of IoT systems to be more proactive and personalized without compromising security and privacy, thereby improving decision making, increasing efficiency and enabling new types of computing applications. This Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI) will be brought about by collaborative research efforts between industry and the University of Colorado Boulder (CU), which will advance the areas of Computing Systems, Programming Languages and Verification, and Visualization. Researchers at CU will investigate foundational research under three thrusts. First, under the Computing Systems thrust, investigators will develop fundamental, developer-friendly, system-level services at the middleware layer to integrate mobile nodes, IoT devices and edge servers. Second, for the Programmability thrust, investigators will create new techniques that enable software developers to effectively create and evolve rich PPI applications that, by construction, are secure, privacy-preserving and reliable. Finally, under the Visualization thrust, investigators will explore methods to help data stakeholders, research scientists, and policymakers to understand their data and/or make sense of decisions made by Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Advances in IoT impact many facets of everyday life. The PPI Center explores research thrusts in Artificial Intelligence, Computing Systems, Programmability, Visualization, and Computer Security and Privacy that are broadly applicable beyond IoT systems to a variety of other scientific domains such as environmental science, agriculture, biology and robotics. The research outputs will be disseminated through publications, research presentations to industry and academia, open-source code and industrial collaborations. The Center will train graduate students through hands-on experience on projects relevant to industrial collaborators. The educational activities include summer schools for industry engineers and K-12 outreach through partnerships with CU’s programs. The PPI Center will maintain a publicly-accessible project repository that will store open-source code, publicly available datasets, papers and other research outputs that can be disseminated to the general public. This repository will be maintained for the lifetime of the center and the URL will be http://ppicenter.org. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.