In this talk, I will introduce our group’s work on the foundations and applications of Human Cyber Physical Systems with a concrete use case of on-demand delivery as part of the Gig Economy. The key challenge for on-demand delivery is to obtain real-time gig worker status in a cost-efficient approach to enable timely delivery and efficient order scheduling. However, the existing sensing approaches in both industry and academy has limited scalability due to cost issues.  Based on our collaboration with Alibaba On-demand Delivery Platform, I will introduce a nationwide sensing system called aBeacon exploring a hybrid solution of hardware, software, and human participation. aBeacon detects and infers the status of more than 3 million workers in 364 cities in China via a sophisticated tradeoff between performance, cost, and privacy. I will provide some lessons learned and insights when aBeacon evolves from the conception to design, deployment, validation, and operation. Finally, I will discuss a few new challenges and open problems in Cyber Physical Systems.

Desheng Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University and a Connection Science Fellow at MIT Media Lab. He is broadly interested in Mobile Sensing, Data Science, Ubiquitous Computing, and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), with a focus on sensing, prediction, and decision-making for cross-domain mobile systems including cellular networks, Wi-Fi networks, mobile payment, taxis, buses, subways, bikes, personal vehicles, electric vehicles, trucks, and social networks with applications to Smart Cities, Gig Economy, and Connected Vehicles. Desheng is the lead PI for 5 NSF projects to study various system properties and applications of CPS from the equity of sociotechnical CPS to adaptability of self-evolving CPS, privacy of mobile CPS, the interoperability of vehicular CPS, and safety of mobile CPS. His technical contributions have led to more than 90 papers in premium Computer Science venues, e.g., UbiComp, MobiCom, SenSys, NSDI, ICDE, SIGSPATIAL, IPSN, ICCPS, BigData, RTSS, ICDCS. He has been honored with 6 best paper/thesis/poster awards.

Details: https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~dz220/