Professor Alex Bayen Receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Alexandre Bayen of CEE's Civil Systems program is the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The CAREER program offers NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution. The intent of the program is to provide stable support at a sufficient level and duration to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars.

The CAREER award will support Professor Bayen's project entitled: "Lagrangian Sensing in Large Scale Cyber-Physical Infrastructure Systems." This project includes the development of theory and algorithms, the design of a system architecture, and the prototyping, testing and large scale deployment of two mobile sensing platforms.

The two applications are highway traffic estimation and river flow estimation using GPS-equipped smartphones. The algorithms run online, gather mobile data and send it to a server, which uses inverse modeling to estimate the state of the system. It broadcasts information back to the smartphones and to the internet. A field operational test, called Mobile Millennium is aimed at reaching thousands of users in California. The river flow monitoring project is aimed at deploying a hundred drifters in the Sacramento Delta.

The project investigates the question: how to reconstruct the state of a distributed system from mobile sensors which cannot control their motion?

Congratulations, Professor Bayen, on receiving this prestigious award!