Speaker: Dr. Qi Zhu Northwestern University
Time: 2017-12-20 10:00-2017-12-20 11:00
Venue: FIT 1-222

Abstract:

Intelligent engineering systems, such as autonomous vehicles, industrial robots, smart buildings and infrastructures, wearable devices and medical systems, have shown great economic and societal promises in recent years. The rapid development of sensing, data processing, control and communication methods brings new intelligent functionality and propels system advancement. However, the design and implementation of these systems are facing tremendous challenges beyond functionality, in particular on system timing and security. In many cases, violation of timing and security requirements may in fact lead to incorrect functional behavior and system failures. 
In this talk, I will discuss timing and security challenges in the design of intelligent systems, with examples from automotive electronic systems and vehicular networks. I will introduce our work in combating these challenges with design automation techniques, including 1) a cross-layer modeling, simulation, synthesis and verification framework for connected vehicle applications, and 2) a timing-driven and contract-based software synthesis framework that automatically explores the large software design space and addresses timing-related metrics such as schedulability, security, performance, extensibility, reliability and fault tolerance. 

Short Bio:

Dr. Qi Zhu is a tenured Associate Professor at the EECS Department in Northwestern University from January 2018. He was an Assistant Professor and later Associate Professor at the ECE Department in University of California, Riverside from 2011 to 2017, and a Research Scientist at the Strategic CAD Labs in Intel from 2008 to 2011. Dr. Zhu received a Ph.D. in EECS from University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and a B.E. in CS from Tsinghua University in 2003. His research interests include model-based design and software synthesis of cyber-physical systems, CPS security, embedded and real-time systems, energy-efficient buildings and infrastructures, and system-on-chip design. He received best paper awards at the DAC 2006, DAC 2007, ICCPS 2013, and ACM TODAES 2016. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2016, and the IEEE TCCPS (Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems) Early-Career Award in 2017. Dr. Zhu has served on the technical program committees and as session organizer and chair for a number of international conferences, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, CODES+ISSS, RTSS, RTAS, SAC, SIES, MEMOCODE, etc. He received the ACM SIGDA Service Award in 2015.