Center for Cyber-Physical Systems
Dr. J. Cecil & Dr. Blayne Mayfield
Co-Directors
Our state of the art Center is unique for its research, education and outreach activities which emphasize an Information Centric Engineering (ICE) perspective involving adoption of Human-Comouter Interaction (HCI) and Cyber Physical System (CPS)/IoT concepts, principles and technologies across various fields of engineering and medical systems.
Special Project to help our autistic student community
Labs involved in this Center
- The Virtual Reality and Information Centric Engineering Lab (Dr. J. Cecil)
- Digital Entertainment Lab (Dr. Blayne Mayfield)
- Robotic Cognition lab (Dr. Chris Crick)
- Cyber Security Lab (Dr. Johnson Thomas)
We have pioneered information centric research, educational and outreach activities in traditional and emerging areas of engineering, medicine and other domains. Our Center’s unique perspective and expertise revolves around Next Generation smart technologies and related modeling, simulation and exchange approaches for a range of process contexts.
The Virtual Reality and Information Centric Engineering Lab
Our primary research interests can be broadly described as investigation of information centric issues with a thematic emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) (also referred to as Human-Centered Computing HCC) dealing with:
- Investigation of HCI based principles and approaches addressing design of Extended
Reality XR (including Virtual Reality/Mixed Reality VR/MR) based environments and
interfaces,
Design of IoT/Cyber-Physical approaches involving VR/MR environments as links between collaborative distributed resources approaches across various process domains: Smart Health/Medicine, Deep Space Colonization and Space Systems, Robotics / Manufacturing and Cyber Learning. - Specifically, our research interests include the following areas:
- Design of HCI based interfaces, approaches and environments for assistive and collaborative
activities
- Study of role of HCI attributes (affordance, visual density and cognitive load) on user performance / behavior in 3D Extended Reality (XR) environments
- HCI based design of Digital Training Twins for collaborative and assistive functions
- Investigation of the roles of XR (including VR/MR) environments as links between cyber and physical worlds
- Design of environments and assistive technologies in the context of Future of work at the Human-Technology frontier
- Creation of Digital Twin Enhanced IoT/CPS frameworks for distributed collaborative activities
- Design of HCI enhanced human-cyber-physical (HCP) environments to support STEM+C Learning for autistic student communities
- Information Modeling to facilitate participatory design and collaboration
- Representations of Information-rich abstractions as participatory design foundations for HCI design activities
- Modeling data/information based functional relationships in the life cycle of target processes (for various domains)
A summary of our current projects can be found here
Notable Achievements
Developing the first cyber physical and Internet-of-Things (IoT) test bed for advanced manufacturing as part of GENI / US Ignite initiatives
Creation of the first Holistic Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) framework to support the design of Extended Reality (XR) based training simulators
Proposed and emphasized the notion of a 3D digital twin as the link between cyber and physical components in IoT enabled cyber-physical Frameworks
Developing autonomous coordination strategies involving UAVs for weather monitoring teams (as part of the multi-university CLOUDMAP project).
Developing virtual learning environments for students with Autism.
Designing deep space habitats in collaboration with NASA.
Collaborative Goal and Policy Learning from Human Operators of Construction Co-Robots.