Research Seminars
L E C T U R E S E R I E S
The one-credit course is designed to give students a broad overview of the projects going on at Vanderbilt as well as cross-training that will prepare them both for the internships and for their future careers. Each class will consist of two components: an introduction to a Vanderbilt research project presented by the project PI along with either a hands-on demonstration of the project or a discussion of a reading assignment. Generally, there are one or two short articles required for reading each week.
Materials from the previous seminars can be found here: 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018
2023 SCHEDULE
Monday, Jan 9: First Meeting
Introduction to the PIRE program
Monday, Jan 23: Technological Systems and Society: An Introduction
General introduction to privacy regulations
Monday, Jan 30: Privacy by Design: How to Embed Privacy Goals in Software Design
Summary of research: presentation on the Policy Forge project by Professor Janos Sztipanovits
Dr. Janos Sztipanovits is currently the E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He is founding director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS). His current research interest includes the foundation and applications of Model-Integrated Computing for the design of Cyber Physical Systems. His other research contributions include structurally adaptive systems, autonomous systems, design space exploration and systems-security co-design technology. He served as program manager and acting deputy director of DARPA/ITO between 1999 and 2002 and he was member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board between 2006-2010. He was founding chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Software (SIGBED). Dr. Sztipanovits was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2000 and external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2010. He graduated (Summa Cum Laude) from the Technical University of Budapest in 1970 and received his doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1980.
Monday, Feb 6: Safety and Policy for CAVs and Drones
Presentation by Professor Dasom Lee
Dasom Lee is an assistant professor in digitalized sustainable energy in the Department of Governance and Technology for Sustainability (CSTM) at the University of Twente, Netherlands. She specializes in energy, cyber-physical systems, environmental sustainability, political sociology, and economic sociology. More specifically, her research focuses on governing and regulating newly emerging cyber-physical systems in the transportation and energy industries and understanding the processes of energy decentralization and energy democracy. She collaborates with engineers and computer scientists to analyze the impacts of energy and transportation systems on social issues such as sustainability, privacy, and equity. She received her PhD in Sociology with a minor in Quantitative Methods from Vanderbilt University, USA and a master’s degree in Economics from Kyoto University, Japan. Her scholarship has been published in journals such as Utilities Policy, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, and Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions.
Monday, Feb 13: Driver Control, Traffic Control, and Traffic Stability
Summary of research: presentation by Professor Dan Work
Dan Work is a Chancellor Faculty Fellow and associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, computer science, and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. He has held research appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2010-17), Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (2015, 2020), Microsoft Research Redmond (2009), and Nokia Research Center Palo Alto (2007-09). Dr. Work pioneered methods for monitoring and controlling road traffic using vehicles, rather than fixed infrastructure, to sense and control road congestion. In 2015 he and his collaborators were the first to experimentally demonstrate that "phantom" traffic jams, which seemingly occur without an obvious cause but are due to human driving behavior, can be eliminated via control of a small fraction of automated vehicles in the flow. Work is a recognized transportation expert whose work has appeared in media outlets including ABC's Good Morning America, Reuters, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. Dr. Work received a 2018 Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering and a 2014 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He earned a BS from Ohio State in 2006, and an MS (2007) and PhD (2010) from UC Berkeley, all in civil and environmental engineering.
Monday, Feb 20: "Driving with visual impairments – limitations, compensations and the potential of assistive technologies"
Presentation by Bianca Biebl
Bianca Biebl joined the Chair of Ergonomics as a research assistant in November 2019. She studied Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and completed her master's degree there with a focus on neuropsychology. In her master's thesis, she investigated the influence of the subjective body center on the accuracy of manual movement trajectories. Currently, Ms. Biebl is working on the gaze and driving behavior of visually impaired drivers and the development of a cooperative human-machine system to compensate for visual impairments as part of a DFG funded project. Her research interests also include the intended use of highly automated vehicles and the modeling of driver behavior in intersections.
Monday, Feb 27: Autonomy and Safe Artificial Intelligence: Submarine Vehicles
Presentation by Professor Gabor Karsai
Dr. Gabor Karsai is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Software-Integrated Systems. He has over thirty years of experience in software engineering. He conducts research in the design and implementation of embedded systems, in programming tools for visual programming environments, in the theory and practice of model-integrated computing, and in resource management and scheduling systems. He received his Diploma, MSc, and Dr. Techn. degrees from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1982, 1984 and 1988, respectively, and his PhD from Vanderbilt University in 1988. He has published over 150 papers, and he is the co-author of four patents. He has managed several large research projects on model-based integration of embedded systems, model-based toolchains, fault-adaptive control technology, and coordinated scheduling and planning.
Monday, Mar 6: Security, Adaptive Cruise Control, Traffic Lights, and Dynamic Routing
Summary of research: Presentation by Professor Xenofon Koutsoukos
Xenofon Koutsoukos is a Professor of Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. He is also a Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS). Before joining Vanderbilt, Dr. Koutsoukos was a Member of Research Staff in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) (2000-2002), working in the Embedded Collaborative Computing Area. Between 1993 and 1995, he joined the National Center for Space Applications, Hellenic Ministry of National Defense, Athens, Greece as a computer engineer in the areas of image processing and remote sensing. He received the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in January 1998 and the Master of Science in Applied Mathematics in May 1998 both from the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering working under Professor Panos J. Antsaklis with the group for Interdisciplinary Studies of Intelligent Systems. His research work is in the area of cyber-physical systems with emphasis on formal methods, distributed algorithms, diagnosis and fault tolerance, and adaptive resource management. He has published numerous journal and conference papers and he is co-inventor of four US patents. He is the recipient of the NSF Career Award in 2004, the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009 from the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, and the 2011 Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) Associate Administrator (AA) Award in Technology and Innovation from NASA.
Monday, Mar 13: No class. Spring break
Monday, March 20: From Causality to Accountability
Presentation by Professor Alexander Pretschner
Professor Pretschner studied computer science at RWTH Aachen and at the University of Kansas where he was a Fulbright grant recipient. After obtaining his doctorate at TUM, he worked as a senior researcher at ETH Zurich for five years. Within the framework of the Fraunhofer Attract Program he then moved on to head a research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern. Parallel to this he was an adjunct associate professor at TU Kaiserslautern. Before joining TUM as a full professor in 2012, Professor Pretschner was a full professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Professor Pretschner has been founding director of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation since 2018. Since 2016 he has served as scientific director and since 2019 spokesman of the scientific board of fortiss, the Bavarian state research institute for software-intensive systems and services. The research area of Professor Pretschner is software and systems engineering. His main focus is on testing and information security.
Monday, March 27: Introduction to the electricity grid, the smart grid, distributed energy, and demand management
Presented by Professor David Hess
David J. Hess is a professor in the Sociology Department at Vanderbilt University and Director of Environmental and Sustainability Studies. His research and teaching is on the sociology, anthropology, and policy studies of science, technology, health, and the environment. He is the recipient of the Robert K. Merton Prize, the Diana Forsythe Prize, the Star-Nelkin Prize (shared with coauthors), the William H. Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award, and the General Anthropology Division Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship. He has been a Fulbright scholar and the PI and Co-PI on grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and FIPSE.
Monday, April 3: Transactive Energy Project Summary
Presented by Professor Himanshu Neema
Himanshu Neema is a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. He holds a MS and PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University. Dr. Neema researches in the general area of model-based design and modeling and simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems and their integrated simulation with hardware- and humans- in the loop. His research interests include Cyber-Physical Systems, Heterogeneous Simulation Integration, System-of-Systems, Resilient Systems, System Security, Design Automation, Design Space Exploration, Machine Learning, Constraint Programming, Planning & Scheduling, Operations Research, Service-Oriented Architectures, Transactive Energy, and Smart Cities. Dr. Neema has 23 years of experience in research and development of software applications covering above areas and has co-authored more than 70 publications. He is the creator of the model-based simulation integration and rapid experimentation framework called Cyber-Physical Systems Wind Tunnel (CPSWT), which has been recently successfully transitioned to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Monday, April 10: Presentation by Professor Craig Blaha
Monday, April 17: Presentations by students
Monday, April 24: Student presentations continued