2024 Outstanding Student Paper Prize, CSS TC on Smart Cities

The committee for the Outstanding Student Paper Prize 2024 of the Technical Committee on Smart Cities announced this year’s prestigious award recipients. Among six national nominations, one paper written by two CISE students stood out for its innovative contributions to the field of smart cities. Ehsan Sabouni and H.M. Sabbir Ahmad and their collaborators are exemplars of academic excellence and collaborative spirit. Their achievement not only highlights individual brilliance but also celebrates the collective efforts of the intelligent cities community in advancing urban innovation.

More info: https://www.bu.edu/cise/cise-students-win-css-tc-2024-paper-prize/

The Future of Driving

By Brendan Galvin, CISE Staff Writer

The National Highway Traffic and Safety Association reports that 94% of serious car crashes are due to human error. Christos Cassandras, Boston University Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, and a co-founder of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE), has made monumental contributions to the research of network of vehicles and using systems to eliminate human error on the roads.

More info: https://www.bu.edu/cise/the-future-of-driving-control-barrier-functions-and-the-internet-of-vehicles/

Smart Technology: Open Source and Equitable

Cassandras is working on a Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation project entitled “Creating a global open research platform to better understand social sustainability using data from a real-life smart village” as part of a partnership between Boston University and Red Hat housed at the Hariri Institute of Computing. The goal of the project is to develop open source, smart city infrastructure. This project aims to develop smart traffic lights in Veberöd, Sweden whereby traffic lights will adjust the duration of a red or green light depending on road congestion.

More info: https://www.bu.edu/hic/2023/06/23/smart-technology-open-source-and-equitable/

New Book: Safe Autonomy with Control Barrier Functions: Theory and Applications

This new book presents the concept of Control Barrier Function (CBF), which captures the evolution of safety requirements during the execution of a system and can be used to enforce safety. It discusses how safety can be guaranteed via both theoretical and application perspectives and how it can be easily implemented in real-time systems that require high-frequency reactive control. Applications include autonomous driving, robotics, and traffic control.

More info: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-27576-0#about-this-book

3rd Edition of “Introduction to Discrete Event Systems”

The Third Edition of “Introduction to Discrete Event Systems” was published in November 2021. The book, originally published in 1999, is a comprehensive introduction to the field of discrete event systems, offering a breadth of coverage that makes the material accessible to readers of varied backgrounds. The book emphasizes a unified modeling framework that transcends specific application areas, linking the following topics in a coherent manner: language and automata theory, supervisory control, Petri net theory, Markov chains and queueing theory, discrete-event simulation, and concurrent estimation techniques. The third edition is a “superset” of the second one, with new material based on the teaching of discrete event systems courses by the two co-authors at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. They reflect active research trends and new topics in discrete event systems since the publication of the second edition, as more thorough coverage of existing topics.

More info: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-72274-6#about

NEXTCAR Self-Driving car in action

Congestion Maps Platform Made Public

$900k NSF Grant to Predict Heart Disease, Diabetes Using Machine Learning

Researchers from the College of Engineering and Boston Medical Center (BMC) will use a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and pilot a health informatics system to predict patients at risk of heart disease or diabetes, and enable early intervention and personalized treatment. Click here to read more.