IUCRC Phase I Oakland University: Center for Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI)

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the ecosystem of computing devices (e.g. cellphones, household appliances, vehicles, etc.) connected to each other via the internet. The goal of the Center is to enable the next generation of IoT systems to be more proactive and personalized without compromising security and privacy, thereby improving decision making, increasing efficiency and enabling new types of computing applications. This Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI) will be brought about by collaborative research efforts between industry and Oakland University (OU), which will advance the areas of intelligent transportation, edge intelligence, and smart energy. Researchers at OU will investigate foundational research under three thrusts: Intelligent Transportation/Edge AI, Software Engineering Intelligence, and Smart Energy. The proposed research projects will investigate several challenges related to managing the complexity in deploying ML applications on the edge in constrained hardware environments such as embedded devices in cars; developing personalized, context-aware sensing-analysis-actuation solutions in smart vehicles and enabling smart electric systems that help customers use the most energy when demands are lower. These research projects are related to the next step in IoT technologies evolution which involves developing AI and machine learning applications that run on the edge, closer to where data is produced and consumed such as embedded devices in smart cars. Advances in IoT impact many facets of everyday life. The PPI Center explores research thrusts in Artificial Intelligence, Smart Energy, Intelligent Transportation, Computing Systems, Programmability, Visualization, and Computer Security and Privacy that are broadly applicable beyond IoT systems to a variety of other scientific domains such as environmental science, agriculture, biology and robotics. The research outputs will be disseminated through publications, research presentations to industry and academia, open-source code and industrial collaborations. The Center will train graduate students through hands-on experience on projects relevant to industrial collaborators. The educational activities include summer schools for industry engineers and K-12 outreach through partnerships with OU’s programs. The PPI Center will maintain a publicly-accessible project repository that will store open-source code, publicly available datasets, papers and other research outputs that can be disseminated to the general public. This repository will be maintained for the lifetime of the center and the URL will be http://ppicenter.org. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.