INTEGRATED INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE

University and City Maps

  • VIEW MAP
  • VIEW MAP
  • VIEW MAP

Intelligent Infrastructure (the foundation of ARPA-I) goes well beyond transportation and will be the brains of our economy. Providing advanced city services, resilient and carbon-free economies, closing the technology divide, enabling autonomous systems, and most important; securing data for people, cities, and governments. Creating millions of new jobs and economic growth nationwide.

The Interstate Highway “1955 Yellow Book Maps” created scars across our nation, this new Intelligent Infrastructure will create unified communities. The Autonomy Institute is working with private infrastructure investors to scale deployments.

Concept Overview:

  • Installation of 7,500 PINNs – 1,500 per 5 cities

  • The goal of this becomes the “Reference Architecture” for a national buildout.

  • Time for the United States to build the Intelligent Infrastructure for the 21st century.

21st-century infrastructure. After three years of highly collaborative work with city/state/federal agencies and over 100 industry partners, the Public Infrastructure Network Node (PINN) has become a platform. It is a new asset class within cities, states, and soon federal. Though it is agnostic to any specific technology, it is highly designed around the digital devices that have to be densified within cities. Intelligent Infrastructure will create unified communities, time to eliminate the digital divide, and install the equivalent roads of the 21st century. We have dozens of cities and states engaged and have weekly calls with many federal agencies. 

Austin in an ideal location for a large urban testbed because enabling technologies such as broadband, 5G wireless, edge computing, intelligent transportation systems, and resilient electrical grids are already being deployed. Further, over the last few years, the City of Austin has passed several resolutions to support smart city technologies and smart mobility, and has just recently initiated Project Connect – the largest transportation project in the city’s history. Austin is also home to UT Austin – a university that is committed to autonomy and has relevant expertise and facilities – and to a plethora of partners including the the Autonomy Institute, which is spearheading the deployment of PINNs throughout the city.

 

Pittsburgh’s long and rich history in robotics and autonomy started in 1979, with the creation of the world’s first Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and led to victory in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge for autonomous vehicles. Pittsburgh is the home of the Metro 21 Smart Cities Institute at CMU, the Army Futures Command AI Task Force, the National Robotics Engineering Consortium, and the autonomous vehicle test facilities of Uber and Argo (ford). It was the first city in the world in which commercial Uber service using autonomous vehicles was provided. Co-PI Satyanarayanan pioneered edge computing in 2009, and CMU continues to be a leader in this area.

Chattanooga was the first city in the Western hemisphere to implement a community-wide fiber-to-the- premise network, covering 600 square miles. Deployed by EPB in 2009, it now provides access to 10Gbps Internet service for approximately 180,000 households and businesses. The Chattanooga Smart Commu- nity Collaborative (CSCC), founded in 2018, build on this legacy and provides a trusted framework for collaboration, enabling partners to easily access resources across organizational and sector boundaries. In 2018, UTC also launched a new Center for Urban Informatics and Progress (CUIP) to foster research and development in urban infrastructure, autonomous vehicles (AVs), intelligent mobility, IoT applications, and energy efficiency.

North Carolina is home to the AERPAW testbed, led by NC State, and known as the leading wireless platform for testing UAV autonomy applications. North Carolina also offers a new center for sixth generation wireless communications (6GNC), as well as the FREEDM and ASSIST Engineering Research Centers. There is interest across the state in communication and autonomy from Research Triangle Park to City of Raleigh, the Department of Commerce, the NC DOT, and to Fort Bragg.

The Lafayette/West Lafayette community is well-suited for experiments in a small city context surrounded by a rural environment. Purdue’s research and innovation leadership in intelligent/autonomous systems is broad and deep. For example, the College of Engineering Autonomous and Connected Systems Initiative (ACSI) is advancing the science and engineering of autonomy, robotics, and the internet of things (IoT). The Wabash Heartland Innovation Network (WHIN) – a consortium of 10 counties in north-central Indiana – is devoted to fueling prosperity by harnessing the power of Internet-enabled sensors for regional growth to becomes a global epicenter of digital agricultural and next-generation manufacturing.

PI John-Paul (JP) Clarke is a professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Memorial Chair in Engineering. Prior to joining the faculty at UT Austin, he was a faculty member at Georgia Tech, the Vice President of Strategic Technologies at United Technologies Corporation (now Raytheon), a faculty member at MIT, and a researcher at Boeing and NASA JPL. He has also co-founded multiple companies. Clarke is a leading expert in aircraft trajectory prediction and optimization, especially as it pertains to the development of flight procedures that reduce the environmental impact of aviation, and in the development and use of stochastic models and optimization algorithms to improve the efficiency and robustness of aircraft, airline, airport, and air traffic operations. His contributions to aerospace extend well beyond his research. Clarke is the founding chair of the AIAA Human- Machine Teaming Technical Committee, was co-chair of the National Academies Committee that developed the US National Agenda for Autonomy Research related to Civil Aviation, and has chaired or served on advisory and technical committees chartered by the AIAA, EU, FAA, ICAO, NASA, the National Academies, the US Army, and the US DOT.

Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya) (Co-PI) is an experimental computer scientist, an ACM and IEEE fellow, and the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is credited with many of the advances in edge computing, distributed systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing, and Internet of Things. His research focus is around performance, scalability, availability, and trust challenges in computing systems from the cloud to the mobile edge. His work on the Andrew File System (AFS) was recognized with the prestigious ACM Software System Award in 2016 and the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2008 for its excellent engineering and long-lasting impact. His work on disconnected operation in Coda File System received the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2015 and the inaugural ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award in 2016. He served as the founding Program Chair of the IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing and the HotMobile workshops, the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing, and the founding Area Editor for the Synthesis Series on Mobile and Pervasive Computing. In addition, he was the founding director of Intel Research Pittsburgh and an advisor to the company Maginatics, which was acquired by EMC in 2014.

Dr. Mina Sartipi (Co-PI) is the Director of the Center for Urban Informatics and Progress (CUIP) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she is a UC Foundation Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. She also leads the Smart Communications and Analysis Lab (SCAL). Dr. Sartipi is a faculty member of Data Science and Engineering at the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. In 2008, she was named UC Foundation Assistant Professor. This award was given to her based on her research activities and students evaluating her teaching. She was awarded the UTC Outstanding Faculty Research and Creative Achievement award in 2016. She has also been awarded the best researcher in the Department of CSE and the college of CECS in 2010, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Dr. Sartipi has been an IEEE senior member since 2016. She has been a member of the Board of Directors for the Enterprise Center, Chattanooga, TN since 2017. Dr. Sartipi’s research interests are in the area of communications and data science, in particular advanced wireless communications and data analysis for smart healthcare and urban futures.

Dr. Robert W. Heath Jr. (Co-PI) is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State. Prior to joining NCSU, he was with the University of Texas at Austin where he was involved in the leadership of their wireless group, and created an initiative to bring together communications, sensing, and machine learning. Dr. Heath is also President and CEO of MIMO Wireless Inc. Dr. Heath’s research interests include wireless communications cellular systems, public safety, and military networks, with recent applications to vehicular communication systems, 5G, and now 6G.

Benoit Montreuil is the Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also Director of the Physical Internet Center and Co-Director of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute. Dr. Montreuil is leading the International Physical Internet Initiative, engaging academic, industry, and government leaders worldwide into research and innovation projects on smart, hyperconnected, and sustainable logistics, supply chains, transportation, businesses, and regions. His main research interests generically lie in developing concepts, methodologies, and technologies for creating, optimizing, transforming and enabling businesses, supply chains and value creation networks to thrive in a fast-evolving hyperconnected world. He stands at the crossroads of industrial and systems engineering; operations research; computer sciences; operations, logistics, supply chain, strategic management; and sustainability science. His research builds mostly on a synthesis of optimization modeling and mathematical programming, discrete & agent-based simulation modeling, systems science & design theory.

Jeffrey Decoux is the Chairman of the Autonomy Institute and Founder and CEO of ATRIUS Industries, Inc. Jeff brings deep technical and business experience, having raised more than $100M in previous ventures in enterprise systems, smart cities, UAV/Drones, and Autonomy. Jeff founded ATRIUS to leverage these new innovations in autonomous robotics to execute complex sensor capture while integrating advanced algorithms, edge computing, computer vision, and machine learning. Prior, Jeff was the Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hangar Technology, Inc., as well as the President of SmartNAP.

Dr. Dan DeLaurentis is the Director of the Institute for Global Security and Defense Innovation Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Purdue University. Dr. DeLaurentis’ research was originally motivated by the emerging paradigm of Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD), which sought to bring historically process-based statistical approaches to product design. His work focused upon the characterization, representation, and quantification of the impact of uncertainty on aerospace design problems. Unique techniques were developed to accomplish this, including the use of Design of Experiments combined with probability theory to obtain rapid estimates of the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of key system metrics and objectives. Subsequently, a more direct adoption of robust feedback control concepts has been applied resulting in a new formulation for the design problem to include technology impact assessments and requirement exploration. In addition to methodological advances, the type of problems being faced by the community is changing significantly. Aerospace problems are increasingly becoming recognized as of the ”system-of-systems” type, consisting of multiple interacting complex systems of differing type and function. The air transportation system is one example, as are associated issues such as personal air transportation and airborne delivery logistics architectures.

Dr. Nuria Gonzalez Prelcic is on the at NC State as an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was previously an Associate Professor in the Signal Theory and Communications Department at the University of Vigo, Spain, and a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Her main research interests include signal processing theory and signal processing and machine learning for wireless communications: filter banks, compressive sampling and estimation, multicarrier modulation, massive MIMO, MIMO processing for millimeter-wave communication and sensing, including vehicle-to-everything (V2X), air-to-everything (A2X) and satellite MIMO communication. She is also interested in joint positioning and communication, joint sensing and communication, radar signal processing, radar and communications co-existence, multi-vehicle sensor fusion and autonomous navigation.

Dr. Paul A. Navratil (Technical Project Manager) is a Research Scientist and Director of Visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an expert in high-performance visualization technologies, accelerator-based computing and advanced rendering techniques. His research seeks to improve analytic capacity and insight communication across scientific workflows, including efficient algorithms for large-scale parallel visualization and data analysis (VDA) and innovative design for immersive VDA systems.

Dr. Dan Stanzione is the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin and the Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Having overseen the construction and operation of many of the world’s leading supercomputers and datacenters over the last twenty years, Dan brings experience in the NSF Major Facilities process, and is the PI for the NSF Leadership Class Computing Facility, and Co-PI for the NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure award in the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). Dan will bring this large facilities experience to the project, as well as the resources and staff for TACC to serve as the back-end computing resources in conjunction with the Edge Computing Resources in the PINN infrastructure.