Unmanned Systems for Harsh Environments

Unmanned Ground Robots (UGVs), Autonomous Underwater Vehicles ( AUVs), and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), whether on the ground, in the air, on sea-surface, in deep waters, or in space, have seen unprecedented levels of growth during the last two decades. However, there still exist many challenges for these engineered systems to replace humans in such harsh environments as mines, wildfires, combat zones, deep sea exploration, and space discoveries. If successful, UAS, UGVs and AUVs can be applied to many civilian/public domain applications such as: traffic monitoring; forest protection; early detection of hurricanes and wildfires; border patrol; emergency response; search and rescue; crime prevention; power line protection; building, highway, bridge, and pipeline inspection; environmental pollution monitoring; agricultural crop spraying; and anomaly detection.

Enhancing Physical and Mental Abilitiesthrough Medical Engineering

The field of biomedical devices is expanding its role into therapeutics through local medication and treatments. Engineers, computer scientists and medical researchers are strengthening their collaborations to develop smarter joints, smarter implants, smarter artificial organs, and smarter organ repair, while tracking and understanding the complex connections within the human brain that could result in new therapies for Down Syndrome, Autism, Parkinson's Disease, and Alzheimer's Disease. Through medical engineering, SECS faculty and students are developing transformative technologies that will result in life style management for the elderly and disabled, and new medical and diagnostic technologies for the treatment of neuro-psychiatric conditions.

Optimal and Sustainable Integrated Energy and Water Systems

Our society has a heightened demand for new sources of energy and more efficient systems for delivering energy. SECS is focused on the integration of various sources of energy, from fossil to nuclear to renewable, all of which need to be engineered and designed for optimal energy solutions. Optimizing efficiency, ensuring maximum reliability, and adhering to resource constraints and limited budgets are all critical pieces of any successful energy management system. Mission critical buildings, such as those operated by hospitals, data centers, industrial and manufacturing facilities, and public transportation operators have the added challenge that their facility functionality is essential to their business. Design of optimal and sustainable energy systems which integrate various resources and manage constraints is a key technological challenge.

Cyber-Physical Systems for Protecting Privacy and Ensuring Trustworthiness

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) tightly integrated hardware and software elements to provide sophisticated and secure services. Important examples of CPS include ground and aerospace vehicles, automated factories, industrical robots, electronic voting machines, health care information systems, sensor networks, and the future Smart Grid. In addition to a variety of civil and military infrastructures. CPS are pervasive and critical to many aspects of modern society. In many cases, CPS operate behind-the-scenes to ensure smooth functioning of integrated comples systems, and to ease human interaction with these systems. Due to the ubiquitous and critical nature, CPS must be highly stable and secure in the face of harsh operating environments, user error, hardware and software faults, and malicious adversaries. In other words, CPS must be "trustworthy."