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 and analysis, 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 the traditional scope of functionality, in particular on system timing and security. In many cases, violation of timing and security requirements may in fact lead to incorrect behavior and system failures. In this talk, I will discuss timing and security challenges in the design of intelligent engineering systems, with examples from automotive electronic systems and vehicular networks. I will introduce our work in tackling these challenges with design automation techniques, including 1) 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; 2) a cross-layer modeling, simulation, synthesis and verification framework for connected vehicle applications; and 3) a new timing paradigm based on weakly-hard constraints for building adaptive and resilient systems.

Bio:

Qi Zhu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Northwestern University. 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, synthesis and verification of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Internet of Things, CPS security, embedded and real-time systems, connected and autonomous vehicles, energy-efficient buildings and infrastructures, and system-on-chip design. He received best paper awards at DAC 2006, DAC 2007, ICCPS 2013, and ACM TODAES 2016. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2016, and the IEEE TCCPS Early-Career Award in 2017. Dr. Zhu is an Associate Editor for IEEE TCAD and IET CPS, and served as a Guest Editor for Proceedings of the IEEE and ACM TCPS. He is the Conference Chair of IEEE TCCPS, and has served on the technical program committee and as organizer for a number of conferences in design automation, embedded and real-time systems, and cyber-physical systems, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, ICCPS, CODES+ISSS, RTSS, RTAS, ICESS, GLVLSI, SAC, SIES, MEMOCODE, SAMOS, FDL, etc. He received the ACM SIGDA Service Award in 2015