Baras, Austin, Yang Secure $1M Agreement with NIST

Published October 13, 2011

The Maryland Cybersecurity Center warmly congratulates John Baras, Mark Austin, and Shah-An Yang on their new $1 million cooperative agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for cyber-physical systems research.

This team will help NIST develop and deploy standards, test methods, and measurement tools to support consistently reliable performance of new smart systems. They will evaluate the existing technical and theoretical foundation for CPS, identify gaps and obstacles, and ascertain needs for measurement and standards. They also will assess existing and anticipated markets and develop a framework to help guide investments in CPS-related research. The research also will devise a framework that fosters an open standards platform enabling systems and underlying subsystems and components to work together. This is expected to unleash creativity in developing innovative, new applications. Finally, the team will develop modeling and analytic tools for designing, integrating, testing and managing CPS.

By developing standards, test methods and measurement tools, the UMD/NIST effort can help U.S. industry accelerate development of innovative cyber-physical system products that create jobs, while also protecting these new types of CPS infrastructure from cyber threats.

“Current approaches to engineering CPS are at their infancy at best, and they are too application-specific, too costly, too error prone and they take too long,” explains Dr. Baras.

“There is a clear need for unifying principles within and across application domains. Investigating and understanding how the cyber components can be synergistically interweaved with the diverse physical components in CPS pose foundational research challenges in science, engineering and computing, and they will transform science and engineering education. We welcome the opportunity to help meet this need and the associated challenges by working closely with NIST scientists and engineers,” added Dr. Baras.

Dr. Baras is the Lockheed Martin Professor in Systems Engineering and the founding (former) director of the Institute for Systems Research.

Dr. Mark Austin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research.

Dr. Shah-An Yang is a postdoctoral research in the Institute for Systems Research

View full text of the NIST press release