National Science Foundation
            

Monitoring and Controlling the Nation’s Critical Infrastructure

The increasing availability of diverse sensing mechanisms, wireless communications, and ubiquitous computational power offer unprecedented opportunities for monitoring and controlling the infrastructures that support our energy, utility, information, utility, healthcare and transportation systems.  Despite the fact that these infrastructures have disparate origins, they are all examples of distributed networked systems, and often have a largely decentralized organization.  Consequently, common engineering and mathematical challenges may arise in the analysis, monitoring and optimization of these infrastructures.  The need for intelligent information processing in Critical Infrastructures is clearly evident.  Signal processing theory and methods aimed at distributed and decentralized monitoring and decision-making, learning and understanding spatiotemporal patterns of behavior in large networked systems, identifying network structures and inferring pathways of information flow, and controlling distributed systems are crucial to optimizing the performance and preserving the operational integrity and security of the Critical Infrastructures

     
 

The conclusions of the National Science Foundation Workshop on Monitoring and Controlling the Nation’s Critical Infrastructures are summarized here:

Workshop Report

.The workshop was organized by NSF Program Directors Dr. John Cozzens and Dr. Sankar Basu and was held on November 17-18, 2006 at the NSF.  The workshop participants were Ian Dobson (UW-Madison), George Dumais (Directorate of Intelligence), Maria Ilic (CMU), Pierre Moulin (UIUC), Jose Moura (CMU), Rob Nowak (UW-Madison), Kannan Ramchandran (Berkeley), John Tsitsiklis (MIT), Jeanne VanBriesen (CMU), Venu Veeravalli (UIUC), and Alan Willsky (MIT).  

Several of the participants made short presentations on the research themes and challenges related to Critical Infrastructures, and their slides are available below.

     
Ian Dobson (UW-Madison), Slides
Pierre Moulin (UIUC), Slides
Jose Moura (CMU), Slides
Rob Nowak (UW-Madison), Slides
Kannan Ramchandran (Berkeley), Slides
John Tsitsiklis (MIT), Slides
Jeanne VanBriesen (CMU), Slides
Venu Veeravalli (UIUC), Slides
Alan Willsky (MIT), Slides