Education and Outreach

Our Education and Outreach (E&O) vision is to support the mission of the project in a manner that is thoroughly integrated into the research and knowledge-transfer programs. At the core of the E&O initiative will be the formation of a new, highly ambitious and highly cross-discipline educational program called Complex Systems Science & Engineering, with sub-disciplines in BioSystems Science & Engineering, and Embedded Systems Science & Engineering.

Key aspects of the project’s E&O program includes an annual Minority-Focused Intersession Workshop for Undergraduates on Understanding and Analyzing Complex Embedded and Biological Systems to be hosted at member institution Lehman College, CUNY; involvement in the JPL Research Affiliates Program, which will allow grads and post-grads from the participating universities to gain hands-on experience in a world-famous aerospace R&D center. We will also implement a series of CMACS Summer Schools for Graduate and Postdoctoral Students, to be hosted at member institutions.

We have also developed the Foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems course, a new class developed at CMU in which undergraduate students quickly advance from learning the basic concepts underlying hybrid systems to being able to prove safety properties about sophisticated CPS using KeYmaera. As part of the course, students design robot controllers and prove safety of their designs for increasingly complex tasks. The challenges that the students solve range from reaching a charging station on a straight line to planar robot motion in the presence of moving obstacles. The course and lecture note material teaches the required background on hybrid programs for CPS, and logic and proof techniques for dynamical systems, including differential dynamic logic and differential invariants. In addition to the lecture materials, we developed a series of video tutorials for KeYmaera. These videos were requisite for the advanced course assignments and they will continue to be a valuable resource for both expert and beginner KeYmaera users. Teaching CPS Foundations with Contracts goes into further detail on the teaching process

A shorter version of the course was offered as a research school at ENS Lyon and Universidade do Minho in 2014.