Research Initiation Award: Integrating AI for Resilient Cloud-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) through Research Initiation Awards (RIA) provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award will help to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness and improve research and teaching at the home institution. This award will advance understanding of AI-integrated cyber security, train undergraduates in AI research, and enhance research capacity at Tuskegee University. Integrating cloud computing with cyber-physical systems enhances computing capability, storage, scalability, and real-time processing, enabling intelligent applications in areas such as robotics, electric power systems, transportation, manufacturing, health care, and smart homes. However, increased connectivity among physical systems, communication networks, and cloud infrastructure also introduces new cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can compromise system integrity, disrupt essential services, threaten public safety, and impact national critical infrastructure. AI offers transformative opportunities to improve cybersecurity through intelligent threat detection, adaptive decision-making, predictive analytics, and automated response to cyber-attacks. This project will establish a multidisciplinary research and education initiative at Tuskegee University to advance the security, resilience, and efficiency of cloud-based cyber-physical systems through AI by developing an experimental research platform and expanding undergraduate research and educational opportunities. Educational activities will include the development of a new undergraduate course on cloud-based cyber-physical systems security, university-wide workshops for students across multiple disciplines, and outreach programs that introduce high school students to AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and cyber-physical systems through interactive laboratory demonstrations. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, open dissemination, and student engagement, the project will strengthen research capacity and prepare a skilled workforce in advanced computing and cybersecurity. The principal investigator and research team will develop a cloud-based cyber-physical systems testbed integrating physical systems, including ground vehicles, robotic platforms, drones, communication networks, cloud computing infrastructure, and feedback control systems, to provide a realistic environment for experimental research, algorithm development, and education. The research will investigate data-driven AI techniques, including long short-term memory networks and reinforcement learning, to detect, predict, and mitigate cyber-attacks, with particular emphasis on integrity attacks, replay attacks, false data injection attacks, noise injection attacks, and network congestion attacks. Unlike conventional model-based approaches, the proposed data-driven AI methods will learn directly from operational data to detect cyber threats, optimize cloud resources, and adapt sensing, communication, and control parameters to maintain secure, resilient, and efficient system operation under dynamic conditions. Experimental validation will quantify improvements in attack detection accuracy, cloud resource efficiency, system resilience, quality of control, communication reliability, and overall operational performance under representative cyber-attack scenarios. Research outcomes will be integrated into undergraduate education through laboratory-based instruction, research experiences, and capstone projects, while university-wide workshops and outreach activities will expand opportunities beyond computer science majors. Open-source software, laboratory modules, datasets, and educational materials will be disseminated through publicly accessible repositories to promote adoption by other institutions. The anticipated outcomes include the establishment of sustainable research infrastructure at Tuskegee University, strengthened interdisciplinary collaborations, expanded undergraduate research opportunities, and the development of a workforce with advanced expertise in cloud computing, AI, cybersecurity, and cloud-based cyber-physical systems. 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.