Chess: Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems

Key Resources:

	Mission statement and organizational overview.
	Resources for Chess researchers (presentation and poster templates, etc.).
	Visitor parking, transportation, directions, lodging .

What Are Cyber-Physical Systems?

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are integrations of computation, networking, and physical processes. Embedded computers and networks monitor and control the physical processes, usually with feedback loops where physical processes affect computations and vice versa. The economic and societal potential of such systems is vastly greater than what has been realized, and major investments are being made worldwide to develop the technology. There are considerable challenges, particularly because the physical components of such systems introduce safety and reliability requirements qualitatively different from those in general-purpose computing. Moreover, the standard abstractions used in computing do not fit the physical parts of the system well.

Applications of CPS arguably have the potential to dwarf the 20^th century IT revolution. They include high confidence medical devices and systems, assisted living, traffic control and safety, advanced automotive systems, process control, energy conservation, environmental control, avionics, instrumentation, critical infrastructure control (electric power, water resources, and communications systems for example), distributed robotics (telepresence, telemedicine), defense systems, manufacturing, and smart structures. It is easy to envision new capabilities, such as distributed micro power generation coupled into the power grid, where timing precision and security issues loom large. Transportation systems could benefit considerably from better embedded intelligence in automobiles, which could improve safety and efficiency. Networked autonomous vehicles could dramatically enhance the effectiveness of our military and could offer substantially more effective disaster recovery techniques. Networked building control systems (such as HVAC and lighting) could significantly improve energy efficiency and demand variability, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and our greenhouse gas emissions. In communications, cognitive radio could benefit enormously from distributed consensus about available bandwidth and from distributed control technologies. Financial networks could be dramatically changed by precision timing. Large scale services systems leveraging RFID and other technologies for tracking of goods and services could acquire the nature of distributed real-time control systems. Distributed real-time games that integrate sensors and actuators could change the (relatively passive) nature of on-line social interactions. The positive economic impact of any one of these applications areas would be enormous.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has established a Collaborative Technology Alliance in the area of Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST). The Berkeley MAST team includes EECS Profs. Michel Maharbiz, Clark Nguyen, Kris Pister, Ronald Fearing, Claire Tomlin, and Shankar Sastry, and includes 8 other universities and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. The goal of the MAST project is to enable the autonomous operation of a collaborative ensemble of multifunctional, mobile microsystems. The MAST project, including options, provides funding of up to $89 million over the next 10 years.

January 24, 2008: We've been posting Embedded Systems Calls For Papers (CFPs).

September 6, 2007: Joint Review Meeting of MURI Projects on High-Confidence Design for Distributed Embedded Systems with the Caltech Specification, Design and Verification of Distributed Embedded Systems MURI and the High-Confidence Design for Distributed Embedded Systems MURI was held at Berkeley. The HCDDES Presentations are available.

June 30, 2007: Professor Edward A. Lee and Professor Stephen Edwards have been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant titled ""PRET: Precision Timed Architectures".

June 17, 2007: The 2007 Annual Report is available.

May 9, 2007: Professor Ahmad Bahai has joined the CHESS faculty

April 11, 2007: Jonathan Sprinkle, the current CHESS Executive Director, will be starting at his faculty position at University of Arizona in July.
Christopher Brooks will be the new CHESS Executive Director.

February 15, 2007: 2007 Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS). A poster session by students, faculty, and postdoctoral scholars, in the area of embedded software and systems. Areas covered include hybrid systems, control, autonomous systems, modeling and computation, as well as tools and applications in these areas.

September 20, 2006: Claire Tomlin, UC Berkeley EECS Associate Professor and CHESS Prinicipal Investigator won a MacArthur Genius Award!

October 4, 2006: Fall ITR Review, Alexandria, VA.

August 23, 2006: The SUPERB Program ended on August 4, and CHESS proudly sponsored Dominique Duncan (University of Chicago), Nandita Mitra (Rutgers University), Nashlie Sephus (Mississippi State University) and Heather Taylor (University of Vermont). These students worked with individual mentors throughout the summer performing research and supporting activities in the area of hybrid and embedded systems. The mentors for the summer were Saurabh Amin, Elaine Cheong, Alex Kurzhanskiy, and Todd Templeton. Each student performed an individual project, culminating in a research paper and poster presentation.

May 31, 2006: The 2006 Annual Report is available.

May 8, 2006: The May 2006 IEEE Computer Magazine contains a cover feature by Edward A. Lee: "The Problem with Threads"

For concurrent programming to become mainstream, we must discard threads as a programming model. Nondeterminism should be judiciously and carefully introduced where needed, and it should be explicit in programs.

February 21-22, 2006: CHESS researchers, Profs. Gabor Karsai, T. John Koo, Shankar Sastry and Janos Sztipanovits, were invited to give lectures at the workshop on Hybrid and Embedded Systems: Technologies and Applications. The workshop was jointly organized by the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation and the Department of Automation and Computer-aided Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, held at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks. Chess researchers also participated in an Open Forum moderated by the Dr. OnChing Yue, Science Advisor of the Innovation and Technology Commission, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, on many important issues ranging from the scientific research to application development of Hybrid and Embedded Systems in the Greater China Region.