CRII: CPS: Society-in-the-Loop Personalized Computing

This project explores frameworks, tools, and methodologies that enable fairness-aware, privacy-aware, society-in-the-loop, personalized Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. Thanks to the rapid growth in mobile computing and wearable technologies, monitoring complex human context becomes feasible, which paves the way to develop human-in-the-loop IoT systems that naturally evolve to adapt to the human and environment state autonomously.

Nevertheless, as we move forward towards a long-standing desire to build effective, pervasive computing systems that are both autonomous and personalized, we can push the envelope of these systems to have a positive collateral effect on society. We can design the personalized systems that are aware of and can mutually adapt to the context of their surroundings for the collective benefit of the users.

This requires new computation paradigms and algorithms to achieve our vision for society-in-the-loop personalized computing.

Designing such personalized IoT applications faces many challenges that arise from "human variability." Such variability stems from different humans, exhibiting different behaviors when interacting with IoT applications (i.e., inter-human variability), when interacting with the same IoT application (i.e., intra-human variability), and when interacting with a group of humans in the same environment (i.e., multi-human variability). To harness these variabilities, this project develops: (i) a framework for "adaptation fairness" when multiple humans co-located in the same environment; (ii) a suite of algorithms for "adaptation agents" to harness human variability, (iii) protocols for collaboration among "adaptation agents" on coordination strategies, and (iv) methods to protect private information held by adaptation agents.

Empirical validation is conducted in two very different domains of interaction, the UCI testbeds for automotive advanced driver assistance systems and for smart home automation. The project engages graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students in the research, test, and evaluation.

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.