Assurance for Autonomous Systems: For Urban Air Mobility Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) collaborate with humans to operate in diverse, safety-critical applications. However, assurance technologies need to be integrated into the design process in order to guarantee safe behavior, thereby enabling UAS operations in the National Airspace System (NAS). In this research effort, formal methods are integrated with learning-enabled systems representations. This approach is agnostic to the learning mechanism used to generate the learned rules. The use cases for the research focuses on contingency management.
Enforcing security and privacy with Assurance for cybersecurity for Internet of Things: The Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a flexible platform for a large number of heterogeneous devices to dynamically join and leave the network. This enhances the availability of a diverse range of services provided by a network. However, this dynamic expansion of the network with mobile IoT devices introduces a major challenge to security especially related to management of trust across the diverse IoT platforms. Thus, arises the necessity for a mechanism that can ensure the selection of secure and trusted devices as these devices try to join the network. In this research effort, we focus on applying formal modeling paradigms such as ontologies, architecture analysis to develop trust as well as identify/enforce security and privacy issues.
Architectural assurance for cybersecurity: Design of cybersecurity solutions for a network is a challenging problem as it involves the integration of several complex components such as routers, servers, computers, smart devices, that include not only essential networking algorithms but also security algorithms. This is further complicated by the need to have robust security policies implemented to prevent violation of confidentiality as the networked devices interact. The design of such complex networked systems demand a more rigorous approach to the modeling and analysis at a higher level of abstraction, which can be inherited from the field of formal methods in software engineering for safety critical systems. This research, is based on formal approach to model and analyze cybersecurity, that along with identification of concrete requirements enables automated analysis to guarantee cybersecurity properties are satisfied within the network.
Assurance for Systems Biology Microbes can transform their environment in unpredictable ways with beneficial outcomes. Microbial species in nature are rarely found in isolation. Instead, most of them form complex communities or consortia with other microbial species. The transformative potential of such microbial communities far exceeds that of any individual species. Microbial co-cultures grown under controlled laboratory environments or microbial consortia found in nature, by virtue of their own biology, can produce molecules with applications in multiple domains e.g. medicine, agriculture and bio-energy. Hence, a structured approach to the understanding of synergistic microbial capacity can significantly boost the utilization of microbial co-cultures/consortia for industrial applications. To this end, we focus on our research effort to integrate Hybrid Systems based approaches to assure the generation of emergent metabolites for meeting beneficial objectives.
