About IEEE Signal Processing Society Winter School on Distributed Signal Processing for Secure Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are engineering systems with integrated computational and communication capabilities that interact with humans through cyber space. The CPSs have recently emerged in several practical applications of significant engineering importance including aerospace, industrial/manufacturing process control, multimedia networks, transportation systems, smart grids, and medical systems, where performing secure and distributed signal processing and control are the key concerns. A significant challenge in distributed monitoring in CPSs is the difficulty in acquiring secure data from geographically distributed sensors.

The signal processing system in place should be able to: offer security against potential physical and cyber-attacks, extract relevant information in an adaptive and event-based fashion, preserve the privacy of the communicated information, estimate cooperatively the underlying state of the physical system in intelligent and intuitive ways, and adapt to changing conditions of the underlying physical system. In the context of CPSs, realization of such a distributed and secure signal processing framework requires addressing the following key research topics: (i) Managing resource (e.g., network and power) constraints; (ii) Securing the estimation/control protocols, and; (iii) Cooperative fusion of information collected via a multitude of interacting sensors.

To accommodate these critical aspects of CPSs, this Winter school will provide an introduction to the current efforts on developing secure and distributed signal processing solutions in CPSs. Topics will range from foundations of CPSs, resource management techniques, distributed estimation and control, security of aspects of estimation and control algorithms, to recent CPS applications including smart grids, autonomous navigation, networked control systems, and robotics.

Whereis the Winter School?

The School will take place at Concordia University. The events will take place in the Engineering, Computer Science & Visual Arts Integrated Complex (EV) located in the heart of downtown Montreal. The EV building features flexible and reconfigurable lecture theaters ideally suited for meetings.