The CPS Virtual Organization

Abstract:

The National Science Foundation's Cyber-Physical Systems program promotes the vision of developing a scientific and engineering foundation for systems that are built as networks of physical and computational components operating at many scales, yet which remain safe, secure, and dependable — "systems you can bet your life on." The CPS challenge spans essentially every engineering domain. It requires the integration of knowledge and engineering principles across many computational and engineering research disciplines (computing, networking, control, human interaction, learning theory, as well as mechanical, chemical, biomedical, and other engineering specialties) to develop a "new CPS system science." The objective of the CPS "Virtual Organization" (CPS-VO) is to actively build and help support the multidisciplinary community needed to underpin this new research area and to enable international and interagency collaboration on CPS.

Biography:

Chris vanBuskirk has been a Senior Research Engineer and Project Manager at Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems for the past twelve years. Chris’ general professional interests lie in the practical application of novel, model-based formalisms and design methodologies to complex, real-world, human-in-the-loop, science/engineering activities.  After completing an M.S. in Engineering at The University of Mississippi, Chris has pursued a career in R&D at organizations such as Cray Research Inc., UMiss Medical Center, The National Cancer Institute, and Johns Hopkins University.  Currently, in addition to project management duties on the DARPA AVM Program’s META Language and META Design Flow projects, Mr. vanBuskirk also serves as PI for the NSF’s CPS Virtual Organization (http://cps-vo.org/), which actively supports the formation and development of distributed research communities required by the demanding challenges of the massively multi-disciplinary cyber-physical systems domain.