Interim Report on 21st Century Cyber-Physical Systems Education (2015) / Chapter Skim
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1 Summary of Presentations and Workshop Discussions
1 Summary of Presentations and Workshop Discussions
Pages 1-17
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industry cyber-physical systems needs Several speakers from industry spoke about the expected demand for CPS talent. Asked how many individuals with CPS engineering knowledge Ford Motor Company needed, Craig Stephens, with Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, responded "[the]
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John Mills, from SimuQuest, Inc., a software company that develops products that support model-based systems engineering, identified key knowledge areas that he is looking for in employees: plant modeling, algorithm design, control system design, network understanding, and engineering process. There is also a new emphasis on CPS skills, including determinism, managing timing and latency, and co-simulation.
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Indeed, about four-fifths of JPL's science and engineering new hires are recent graduates that JPL intends to develop through hands-on project work and mentoring from senior engineers. Gaps in Skills and Knowledge Several of the speakers from industry noted that engineers who deeply understand and can apply systems thinking -- that is, a deep understanding of how individual parts of a system interrelate with one another and within the system as a whole -- and related concepts such as abstraction and system interaction and who can carry out systems analysis using formal methods and model-based verification are in short supply.
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Rayadurgam noted that students not only need to be able to verify the correctness but convince others of this correctness. Alberto Sangiovanna-Vincentelli, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, commented that it was far more important for students to learn design science principles than to master a particular design technique or tool suite.
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Traditionally, students have spent the early part of their undergraduate years fulfilling basic course requirements, whereas students today, some of whom may have been building things in high school, want to continue building new things. Kevin Massey from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, cautioned that students risk jumping too far ahead, not appreciating that an ability to work with plug-and-play hardware and software is not, ultimately, a substitute for foundational knowledge.
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Creating an Introductory CPS Course Edward Lee, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, discussed his experiences teaching a course titled "Introduction to Embedded Systems" with the goal of introducing students to the design and analysis of computational systems that interact with physical processes. Lee also noted that the traditional view of embedded systems assumes special-purpose hardware and that the chief problem is the interface between sensors and actuators and the system's resource constraints.
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Lee concluded his remarks by expressing hope that by emphasizing modeling, design, and analysis, his course could help students avoid the sort of bruteforce and over-engineering all too often used to build embedded systems today. Also, if students are to be positioned to build the systems of tomorrow, they need to understand not just today's best practices but the weaknesses in those approaches.
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Furthermore, students must be able to understand architectural trade-offs and analysis techniques and gain experience designing and implementing CPS given high-level specifications. Abdelzaher's proposed curriculum, including these elements and drawing on existing electrical engineering and computer science curricula, is shown in Figure 1.2.
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FIGURE 1.2 A model for CPS curriculum. Courses highlighted in gray focus specifically on CPS, while the other courses are existing courses.
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He started by describing emerging applications of aerospace engineering, such as supporting wired and wireless network communications, expanding use of unmanned vehicles, commercial access to low Earth orbit, and addressing environmental and energy challenges as air travel continues to grow. How noted that MIT's AeroAstro department has been working to identify the long-term competencies associated with these applications and build up its faculty in those areas, many of which overlap with CPS knowledge and skills.
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• Place greater emphasis on human-systems interaction and human factors design issues. How concluded by underscoring that it was important not only to impart particular knowledge and develop particular skills, but also to create lifelong learners who can adapt to new technologies, tools, and problems.
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challenges in Building a CPS curriculum Several speakers addressed the related questions of how the teaching and research capacity needed to support CPS education can be built and what other resources are needed to support CPS education. In his remarks, Christopher Gill observed that the situation with CPS today resembles the one roughly two decades ago with distributed realtime embedded systems, when knowledge and skills from the distinct areas of real-time systems, software engineering, and distributed systems had to be integrated.
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, some talks also touched on opportunities to introduce CPS concepts in K-12 education and supplement CPS education and training through industry-academic partnerships, internships, and online, post-graduate continuing education. Industry-Academic Partnerships Dimitri Mavris discussed efforts in his laboratory, the Georgia Institute of Technology's Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL)
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The students participate in week-long tutorials on sensors, controls, signal processing, and embedded systems. Students also participate in laboratory research, gaining familiarity with research practices and laboratory equipment, and develop teamwork and technical writing skills.
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. Egerstedt had taught an embedded and hybrid control systems course at the senior undergraduate level to students from electrical, computer, mechanical, and aerospace engineering and computer science and sought to provide a more solid grounding in theory as well as additional opportunities to apply that theory in practice.
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Egerstedt also suggested that MOOCs could be used to help students lacking prerequisite material or to supplement faculty capabilities. K-12 Education Harry Cheng discussed his work in incorporating CPS into K-12 education at the University of California, Davis, Center for Integrated Computing and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (C-STEM)
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Furthermore, C-STEM supports numerous robotic competitions that develop student skills and foster interest in the curriculum.
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