PARC technical publications

III-Nitride Lasers – Challenges and Approaches to Expand the Emission Wavelength into the UV

Thomas Wunderer — Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 -0700

In this tutorial talk we will review III-Nitride-based laser technology, discuss materials challenges using high band gap semiconductors, and present different approaches and tricks to overcome these barriers (i.e., polarization doping, e-beam excitation and frequency multiplication).

Ethical Considerations for AI Researchers

Kyle Dent — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0700

Use of artificial intelligence is growing and expanding into applications that impact people’s lives. People trust their technology without really understanding it or its limitations. There is the potential for harm and we are already seeing examples of that in the world. AI researchers have an obligation to consider the impact of intelligent applications they work on. While the ethics of AI is not clear-cut, there are guidelines we can consider to minimize the harm we might introduce.

Flexible Electronics and Oral Biosensing

David Eric Schwartz, Brent Krusor, Adrien Pierre, Beverly Russo and Bob Street — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0700

Flexible-hybrid electronics (FHE) combined with printed sensors enables low-cost, customizable, sensor systems for new form factors and applications. The FHE platform is compatible with large-volume sheet-fed or roll-to-roll manufacturing processes. It combines high-performance silicon electronics with peel-and-stick sensor labels for safety, health, environmental monitoring, and other applications. Printable sensors include physical sensors, such as for temperature and pressure, chemical sensors for gases and other analytes, and electrochemical and biochemical sensors. Printing allows for plug-and-play incorporation of sensors onto flexible electronics platforms. This talk will discuss PARC’s work developing FHE fabrication processes, printed sensors, and demonstration systems. The focus will be on a mouth-guard-based FHE biosensor platform to enable continuous remote monitoring of bioanalyte concentrations in saliva. Saliva is favorable for biosensing because of its accessibility and the strong correlation with blood concentrations of important analytes. Chronoamperometry based on enzymatic oxidation of target species has been demonstrated to have high sensitivity and capability for quantification of analyte concentrations. The electrochemical sensor system is fabricated on a small, flexible plastic foil for mounting on a mouth guard, and enable continuous sensing of lactate, glucose, or other analytes. To fabricate the system, PARC has developed a semi-automated FHE process for placing and connecting discrete electronic components on printed interconnect. Sensor electrodes can be customized for various analytes through changing the enzyme layer and are replaceable. Saliva is a complex fluid and prone to biofouling. This is addressed with the development of protective coatings to enable continuous operation for at least eight hours. The electronics are protected from the saliva protected by an encapsulant, and the batteries are wirelessly rechargeable. Remote readout is through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication.

Flexible Hybrid Oral Biochemistry Sensing System

David Eric Schwartz, Brent Krusor, Adrien Pierre, Beverly Russo and Bob Street — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800

On Extensibility and Personalizability of Multi-Modal Trip Planning

Christian Fritz and Matthew Klenk — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800

Trip planning is a practical task that has drawn extensive attention from the AI planning and scheduling community and the industrial/commercial sectors. In this paper, we consider the setting of the multi-modal trip planning, where users can exploit different transportation modes, such as walking, biking, public transit, and taxi. In such a context, it would be of benefit if the user was able to extend the cost base, including traveling time and fare, of the planner, and to personalize the planner according to her own constraints and preferences. To this end, we designed and developed a hipergraph-based multi-modal trip planner that allows users to upload auxiliary cost metrics (e.g., crime rates), to specify constraints as a theory in the linear temporal logic, and to express preferences as a preferential cost function.

Microscopic Simulation and Calibration of a Large-Scale Metropolitan Network: Issues and Proposed Solutions

Matthew Klenk — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0800

Microscopic traffic simulation has been used extensively to study network-wide congestion, traffic operations, traffic incidents, vehicle emissions, the performances of newly built transportation facilities and the effectiveness of traffic improvement projects. Because of the nature of microscopic simulation, it is typically used to study relatively small networks in which the level of demand is not too high and the road network is not large. In this study, INTEGRATION, a microscopic simulation tool, was used to model the Greater Los Angeles Area, a metropolitan area with a population of more than three million. To overcome the computational challenges associated with typical large-scale microscopic traffic simulation, the network was divided into five sub-networks with each network run on a different core, and the input demand file was also partitioned to account for connectivity between sub-networks. The results show that it is completely feasible to microscopically simulate large-scale networks. The findings are significant because they expand the applicability of microscopic simulation tools to large networks, which could only be modeled macroscopically or mesoscopically before. The agent-based microscopic results obtained can provide significantly more detailed vehicle-by-vehicle movement data that are expected to dramatically enhance the data of large-scale network simulations.

Collaborative Human-Machine Interaction in Mobile Phone Support Centers: A Case Study

Kyle Dent, Luke Plurkowski and John Maxwell — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0800

Advances in speech recognition, natural language understanding, and speech synthesis are enabling useful conversational agents. Technology users are becoming habituated to talking to things as the consumer market is exploding with products and personal assistants that allow voice interactions. The current slate of personal assistants can assist people by answering questions and helping to schedule appointments, for example. Moreover, there are task-based virtual agents that partially automate things like ordering food and making hotel reservations. However, these agents fall short of truly interactive, goal-based assistants that have been the focus of our recent research. Our work has identified four types of human-agent interactions: 1. Question/answering 2. Transactional 3. Procedural 4. Diagnostic Question/answering interactions tend to be brief. Individuals ask simple fact-based questions and get answers. However, there is no support for information finding. Systems do not ask clarifying or disambiguating questions, and there is no help to narrow or otherwise make information seeking more precise. Transactional agents collect information from people and then execute a transaction on their behalf like reserving a hotel. These are generally modeled as frame or slot-filling exercises where a set of attributes is required to execute a transaction. While the first two interaction types are addressed by currently available assistants, they do not demonstrate true collaboration towards a shared goal. Although transactional interactions assist people in a task, the goals are predetermined, and the agent simply guides users to them. In both procedural and diagnostic interactions, humans and agents first establish a common goal and then work together to achieve it. Procedural interactions are initiated by a person seeking guidance to accomplish a task. An agent might simply provide some instructions much like simple question/answering, but in truly interactive procedural interactions, the agent understands the procedure as a sequential series of subtasks where each step may include pre-conditions to be satisfied before proceeding. If an obstacle is encountered, the agent should branch to another procedure to resolve it before returning to the original goal. The agent and human operate in tandem to achieve the goal. Diagnostic interactions are initiated when a person presents a problem. Neither the agent nor the individual knows the cause of the problem or how to fix it, but by soliciting symptoms and suggesting trial solutions the agent works collaboratively with the person to discover the root cause and find the correct resolution. We recently worked on a project where we implemented some of our ideas for interactive and collaborative interactions in the form of a virtual agent for customer service centers handling support calls for mobile phones and cellular devices. The business objective was to automate as much of the work done by human support personnel as possible while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. Our agent, Otto, was implemented as a chat agent that handles synchronous textual conversations with customers. It responds to specification questions related to mobile devices (question/answering), explains how to perform tasks like configuring email (procedural) and helps people to troubleshoot problems with their phones (diagnosis).

Printed and Flexible Hybrid Electronics Fabrication (invited)

Qian Wang, Sylvia Smullin, David Eric Schwartz and Martin Sheridan — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0800

This talk will discuss PARC's work in developing printed and flexible-hybrid fabrication technologies and systems.

High-Resolution Health Monitoring of Track and Rail Systems with Fiber Optic Sensors and High-Frequency Multiplexed Readouts

Ajay Raghavan — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0800

Health monitoring of railway systems is critical for detecting incipient faults or degradation. In order to reliably do so, an effective monitoring system must be deployed to provide railroad operators with the highest level of operational awareness and safety. In this study, we explore the use of Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) and a highresolution, low-cost optical readout developed at PARC to interrogate the acoustic emissions generated by a train-rail system. The proposed sensing configuration can allow for a scalable, low-cost, field-deployable solution that could enable near real-time monitoring of tracks and wheels. A proof-of-concept was demonstrated with a G-scale train-rail system with FBGs embedded within the ballast layer. Using PARC’s wavelength shift detector, the acoustic emission signal was resolved in both the time and frequency domain. The findings of this work show promise that this could be a viable solution to deploy an optically-based health monitoring system for railroads.

Spray Processing of Polymers and Complex Fluids: PARC's Filament Extension Atomizer Technology

Elif Karatay and David M. Johnson — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0800

Polymers and similar complex fluids are notoriously difficult to spray process due to their strain hardening behavior in extension. In most cases, strain hardening leads to the formation of stable filaments that resist break-up into droplets. PARC's filament extension atomizer (FEA) is an innovative solution that addresses this problem. FEA takes advantage of the strain hardening behavior of polymers and elastocapillary thinning of the filaments in the high throughput generation of droplets with a narrow size distribution. This technology could be disruptive and could enable the creation of new platforms with a wide range of applications including additive manufacturing. It could also change the formulation paradigm for consumer and specialty products intended for spraying. In this contribution, we will present a few case studies on different materials and applications where FEA can be applied and how it can change the way we think about spray processing.

Leveraging RF power for flexible-hybrid electronics

David Eric Schwartz and Clinton J. Smith — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0800

Power provisioning is a critical need for flexible-hybrid electronics (FHE) systems. Flexible thin-film battery technology has improved significantly in recent years. Yet the small form factors required by many FHE applications necessitate limited capacity. With the extremely low power consumption and advanced power management architectures of emerging electronic components, energy harvesting and remote power delivery have become feasible. Electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio-frequency (RF) waves is one means of delivering power to FHE systems. PARC has developed roll-to-roll printable antennas and rectifiers for RF energy harvesting. Current work includes the development of a system for using steered directed RF energy to power peel-and-stick battery-less sensor tags.

Peel-and-Stick Sensors Powered by Directed RF Energy

David Eric Schwartz and Clinton J. Smith — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0700

PARC, a Xerox Company, is developing a low-cost system of peel-and-stick wireless sensors that will enable widespread building environmental sensor deployment with the potential to deliver up to 30% energy savings. The system is embodied by a set of RF hubs that provide power to automatically located sensor nodes, and relay data wirelessly to the building management system (BMS). The sensor nodes are flexible electronic labels powered by rectified RF energy transmitted by an RF hub and can contain multiple printed and conventional sensors. The system design overcomes limitations in wireless sensors related to power delivery, lifetime, and cost by eliminating batteries and photovoltaic devices. Sensor localization is performed automatically by the inclusion of a programmable multidirectional antenna array in the RF hub. Comparison of signal strengths while the RF beam is swept allows for sensor localization, reducing installation effort and enabling automatic recommissioning of sensors that have been relocated, overcoming a significant challenge in building operations. PARC has already demonstrated wireless power and temperature data transmission up to a distance of 20m with 71s between measurements, using power levels well within the FCC regulation limits in the 902-928 MHz ISM band. The sensor’s RF energy harvesting antenna achieves high performance with dimensions below 5cm x 9cm.

E-beam pumped edge-type emitting UV lasers

Thomas Wunderer — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Invited talk: Electron-beam pumping offers compelling benefits as an excitation source for wide-band-gap AlGaN-based optical emitters. Eliminating p-type doping in the heterostructure design of the devices is one particularly enabling feature. Both high-power spontaneous-emission light sources in the UV-C and low-threshold lasers in the UV-A spectral regimes have been demonstrated. A record measured peak optical output power of 230mW of spontaneous emission at 246nm under pulsed e-beam excitation was realized. E-beam-pumped edge-type emitters lasing at ?=380nm, with threshold currents for the focused beam of only I = 170µA, will be described. ?

Birefringent static Fourier-transform spectrometer for flow cytometry and imaging spectroscopy

Alex Hegyi — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0700

A new concept for a birefringent static Fourier-transform spectrometer, applicable to both spectral flow cytometry and hyperspectral imaging, is introduced. Biological particles or scenes in relative motion are imaged onto a polarization interferometer consisting of a calcite Wollaston prism between parallel polarizers, with polarization axes at 45° with respect to the optical axes of the Wollaston prism. Due to the position-dependent optical path delay of the interferometer, interferograms are generated by the relative motion. These interferograms are recorded either by a flow cytometer detector, or in the case of hyperspectral imaging, by a CMOS focal plane array. Fourier-transforming the interferograms with respect to time yields the optical spectrum of each particle or scene position. The concept has applicability to situations where linear motion is already present, including flow cytometers, conveyor belt systems, fixed-wing aircraft, and nanosatellites.

Diagnosing Alternative Facts

Johan de Kleer, Matthew Klenk and Alexander Feldman — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0700

This paper presents an approach to applying model-based diagnosis to the task of interpreting information from a wide variety of sources: text, video, meta-data, audio, etc. Much of the information streams are contradictory, incomplete, purposely deceptive or biased. People have to make critical decisions based on such murky information. The ultimate users of such systems range from intelligent analysts to ordinary folk. We have developed a preliminary version of our HCDX tool (hypothesis construction through diagnosis). We plan to distribute this tool as open source.

Manufacturable Flexible Hybrid Oral Biochemistry Sensing System (invited)

David Eric Schwartz — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0700

PARC and UCSD are developing a flexible-hybrid electronics (FHE) biosensor platform to enable continuous remote monitoring of bioanalyte concentrations in saliva. Saliva is favorable for biosensing because of its accessibility and the strong correlation with blood concentrations of important analytes. Chronoamperometry based on enzymatic oxidation of target species has been demonstrated to have high sensitivity and capability for quantification of analyte concentrations. The electrochemical sensor system will be fabricated on a small, flexible plastic foil for mounting on a mouth guard, and enable continuous sensing of lactate, glucose, or other analytes. To fabricate the system, PARC is developing a semi-automated FHE process for placing and connecting discrete electronic components on printed interconnect. Sensor electrodes can be customized for various analytes through changing the enzyme layer and are replaceable. Saliva is a complex fluid and prone to biofouling. This is addressed with the development of protective coatings to enable continuous operation for at least eight hours. The electronics are protected from the saliva protected by an encapsulant, and the batteries are wirelessly rechargeable. Remote readout is through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication. This talk will present an overview of the biosensor system, FHE fabrication, and discuss current progress.

RF Energy Harvesting Peel-and-Stick Sensors

David Eric Schwartz — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0700

See slides.

Connected Freight Rail Stock: A Modular Approach Integrating Sensors, Actors and Cyber Physical Systems for Operational Advantages and Condition Based Maintenance

Parham Shahidi — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0700

For decades, the technology of freight railcars has not changed significantly, mostly due to little or no incentive for significant investments in rolling stock. Taking into account the disruptive developments anticipated in automotive trans- portation, this approach appears no longer feasible, especially if regulatory agencies aim to reduce carbon dioxide emis- sions while maintaining economic growth. With the advent of telematics, on-board sensing and cloud-based analytics for control and condition based maintenance, high potential for efficiency improvements has become possible. Such tech- nologies are de facto standards in automotive transport, which induces the need for implementation of similar technologies in rail transport as well. In addition to enabling efficiency gains, telematics, on-board sensing and cloud-based analytics also offer new means to approach pressing problems such as rail noise emission, train integrity and safety against derailment, while at the same time reducing maintenance cost and downtime. Furthermore, a connected wagon offers a seamless integration into cur- rent and future logistics systems, which are driven and con- trolled by the industrial Internet of Things to support the fourth industrial revolution. An important concept, intro- duced with the Wagon 4.0, is standardized hardware, together with an open-source operating system based on prognostics and health management principles for predictive analytics. Thus, the Wagon 4.0 paves the way for new operations and maintenance concepts, user interfaces and value proposals. Additional economic advantages will be made possible from the self-organizing features of such vehicles, the ability to achieve mass customization and from a rise in efficiency in operation and maintenance. This paper describes the basis of such a system including the power supply, intra-train commu- nications, sensing and cloud-based analytics. A study of use cases from railway operation illustrates the ap- proach and highlights the opportunities of this novel system design. The paper concludes with a description of how the implantation enables the railcar operator to practice predic- tive maintenance and increase operational efficiency.

The connected wagon - a concept for the integration of vehicle side sensors and actors with cyber physical representation for condition based maintenance

Qian Wang, Sylvia Smullin, David Eric Schwartz and Martin Sheridan — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0700

For decades, the technology of freight railcars has not changed significantly. With the advent of telematics, on-board sensing and cloud-based analytics for control and condition based maintenance, high potential for economic benefit has become possible. Furthermore, such a connected wagon offers a seamless integration into current and future logistics systems, which are driven and controlled by the industrial Internet of Things to support the fourth industrial revolution. An important concept introduced with the Wagon 4.0 is standardized hardware, together with an open-source operating system based on prognostics and health management principles for predictive analytics. Thus, the Wagon 4.0 paves the way for a new operations and maintenance concepts, user interfaces and value proposals, which originate from current developments. The economic advantages stem from the self-organizing features of such vehicles, from the ability to achieve mass customization and from a rise in efficiency in operation and maintenance. This paper presents an approach for such a system including the power supply, intra-train communications, sensing, cloud-based analytics and value-add proposition. Furthermore, the approach is illustrated through an example implementation for a pneumatic brake which encompasses the instrumentation, sensing, automation and cloud based analytics of the sensor data. The paper concludes with a description of how the implantation enables the railcar operator to practice predictive maintenance and increase operational efficiency.

Closing the Floodgate with Stateless Content-Centric Networking

Ersin Uzun — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a recent paradigm that claims to mitigate some limitations of the current IP-based Internet architecture. The centerpiece of ICN is named and addressable content, rather than hosts or interfaces. Content- Centric Networking (CCN) is a prominent ICN instance that shares the fundamental architectural design with its equally popular academic sibling Named-Data Networking (NDN). CCN eschews source addresses and creates one-time virtual circuits for every content request (called an interest). As an interest is forwarded it creates state in intervening routers and the requested content back is delivered over the reverse path using that state. Although a stateful forwarding plane might be beneficial in terms of efficiency and resilience to certain types of attacks, this has not been decisively proven via realistic experiments. Since keeping per-interest state complicates router operations and makes the infrastructure susceptible to router state exhaustion attacks (e.g., there is currently no effective defense against Interest Flooding attacks), the value of the stateful forwarding plane in CCN should be re-examined. In this paper, we explore supposed benefits and various problems of the stateful forwarding plane. We then argue that its benefits are uncertain at best and it should not be a mandatory CCN feature. To this end, we propose a new stateless architecture for CCN that provides nearly all functionality of the stateful de- sign without its headaches. We analyze performance and resource requirements of the proposed architecture via experiments.

Mobile Sessions in Content-Centric Networks

Marc Mosko and Ersin Uzun — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Content-centric networking (CCN) is focused on transferring named data from producers to consumers upon request. This shifts security from that of a connection or channel to the content itself. There remains, however, many critical uses for the traditional client-server communication model with secure sessions. For instance, in many CCN applications, producers need a way to transfer key material or secret information to consumers. Not only does caching this content fail to serve multiple consumers, encrypting it under long-term, static keys does not afford them any forward secrecy. Consequently, there is a real and present need for a CCN-friendly protocol whose security properties meet or exceed similar transport security protocols in IP networks. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the CCNx Key Exchange Protocol – CCNxKE – the first protocol design for bootstrapping encrypted service- centric sessions in CCN. We compare our design to that of existing IP-based transport security protocols to highlight important differences, discuss several important use cases for CCNxKE and secure sessions in CCN, and present a preliminary performance assessment. Our experiments indicate that session encryption adds, on average, a 30% data transfer latency compared to unencrypted traffic using our prototype implementation.

Why Users Disintermediate Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces

Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 -0700

This paper reports on a study of the prevalence of and possible reasons for peer-to-peer transaction marketplace (P2PM) users turning to out-of-market (OOM) transactions after finding transaction partners within a P2P system. We surveyed 97 P2PM users and interviewed 22 of 58 who reported going OOM. We did not find any evidence of predisposing personality factors for OOM activity; instead, it seems to be a rational response to circumstances, with a variety of situationally rational motivations at play, such as liking the transaction partner and trusting that good quality repeat transactions will occur in the future.

Update on Electrocaloric Cooling Theory and Experiment

David Eric Schwartz — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0700

This talk will cover an ansysis of electrical energy recovery requirements and impact on various electrocaloric cooling cycles. It will also discuss preliminary measurements of a new electrocaloric cooler design capable of high temperature lift and high efficiency.

Time- and wavelength-multiplexed wavelength shift detection for high-resolution, low-cost distributed fiber-optic sensing

Alex Hegyi, Peter Kiesel and Ajay Raghavan — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0700

We present a concept for time- and wavelength-multiplexed readout of wavelength-encoded fiber optic sensors, useful for low-cost distributed sensing and high-resolution monitoring in critical applications such as battery management and energy systems. By taking advantage of the unused photodetector bandwidth in a wavelength-multiplexed fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing system based on an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG), we can time-multiplex the detection of 100s of FBG sensors. Our initial implementation is capable of monitoring over 100 sensors at a simultaneous readout rate of 100 Hz with sensor crosstalk below 100 fm and wavelength noise of 11.5 fm Hz-1/2 from 10 Hz to 50 Hz; the light source used to illuminate the FBGs is the dominant contributor to this noise. We present a simplified theoretical framework for understanding system tradeoffs in terms of AWG channel spacing and a sensor slope factor.

Achieving Differential Privacy in Secure Multiparty Data Aggregation Protocols on Star Networks

Shantanu Rane, Alex Brito, Vanishree Rao and Ersin Uzun — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0700

We consider the problem of privacy-preserving data aggregation in a star network topology, i.e., several untrusting participants con- nected to a single aggregator. We require that the participants do not discover each other’s data, and the service provider remains oblivious to each participant’s individual contribution. Further- more, the final result is to be published in a differentially private manner, i.e., the result should not reveal the contribution of any single participant to a (possibly external) adversary who knows the contributions of all other participants. In other words, we require a secure multiparty computation protocol that also incorporates a differentially private mechanism. Previous solutions have resorted to caveats such as postulating a trusted dealer to distribute keys to the participants, or introducing additional entities to withhold the decryption key from the aggrega- tor, or relaxing the star topology by allowing pairwise communica- tion amongst the participants. In this paper, we show how to obtain a noisy (differentially private) aggregation result using Shamir se- cret sharing and additively homomorphic encryption without these mitigating assumptions. More importantly, while we assume semi- honest participants, we allow the aggregator to be stronger than semi-honest, specifically in the sense that he can try to reduce the noise in the differentially private result. To respect the differential privacy requirement, collusions of mu- tually untrusting entities need to be analyzed differently from tradi- tional secure multiparty computation: It is not sufficient that such collusions do not reveal the data of honest participants; we must also ensure that the colluding entities cannot undermine differen- tial privacy by reducing the amount of noise in the final result. Our protocols avoid this by requiring that no entity – neither the ag- gregator nor any participant – knows how much noise a participant contributes to the final result. We also ensure that if a cheating ag- gregator tries to influence the noise term in the differentially private output, he can be detected with overwhelming probability.

Can We Make a Cake and Eat it Too? A Discussion of ICN Security and Privacy

Ersin Uzun — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0800

In recent years, Information-centric Networking (ICN) has received much attention from both academic and industry participants. ICN offers data-centric inter-networking that is radically different from today's host-based IP networks. Security and privacy features on today's Internet were originally not present and have been incrementally retrofitted over the last 35 years. As such, these issues have become increasingly important as ICN technology gradually matures towards real-world deployment. Thus, while ICN-based architectures (e.g., NDN, CCNx, etc.) are still evolving, it is both timely and important to explore ICN security and privacy issues as well as devise and assess possible mitigation techniques. This report documents the highlights and outcomes of the Dagstuhl Seminar 16251 on ``Information-centric Networking and Security.'' The goal of which was to bring together researchers to discuss and address security and privacy issues particular to ICN-based architectures. Upon finishing the three-day workshop, the outlook of ICN is still unclear. Many unsolved and ill-addressed problems remain, such as namespace and identity management, object security and forward secrecy, and privacy. Regardless of the fate of ICN, one thing is certain: much more research and practical experience with these systems is needed to make progress towards solving these arduous problems.

Improvising Harmony: Opportunities for Technologies to Support Crowd Orchestration

Victoria Bellotti and G. Michael Youngblood — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0800

This paper details the work of a seldom studied but growing population of members of grassroots, offline-project based groups. We aim to understand how these groups self-organize to enable a large number of volunteers to gather and \"get things done,\" and identify design opportunities for technologies to support such work. By studying the work structure, we identified two types of members, regular and episodic participants, who differ in structural role, motivation, and type of work they do. We studied two key tasks: 1) project management, which is mostly done collaboratively by the regular participants; and 2) organization of work events-the project implementation, which involve many episodic participants. For both tasks, we report on common practices and tools that are currently used. We then discuss design implications and user requirements for developing specialized tools to support these tasks.

Embedded Fiber-Optic Sensing for Accurate Internal Monitoring of Cell State in Advanced Battery Management Systems Part 1: Cell Embedding Method and Performance

Ajay Raghavan, Peter Kiesel, Alex Hegyi, Bhaskar Saha and Anurag Ganguli — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

A key challenge hindering the mass adoption of Lithium-ion and other next-gen chemistries in advanced battery applications such as hybrid/electric vehicles (xEVs) has been management of their functional performance for more effective battery utilization and control over their life. Contemporary battery management systems (BMS) reliant on monitoring external parameters such as voltage and current to ensure safe battery operation with the required performance usually result in overdesign and inefficient use of capacity. More informative embedded sensors are desirable for internal cell state monitoring, which could provide accurate state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH) estimates and early failure indicators. Here we present a promising new embedded sensing option developed by our team for cell monitoring, fiber-optic sensors. High-performance large-format pouch cells with embedded fiber-optic sensors were fabricated. The first of this two-part paper focuses on the embedding method details and performance of these cells. The seal integrity, capacity retention, cycle life, compatibility with existing module designs, and mass-volume cost estimates indicate their suitability for xEV and other advanced battery applications. The second part of the paper focuses on the internal strain and temperature signals obtained from these sensors under various conditions and their utility for high-accuracy cell state estimation algorithms.

Embedded Fiber-Optic Sensing for Accurate Internal Monitoring of Cell State in Advanced Battery Management Systems Part 2: Internal Cell Signals and Utility for State Estimation

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

A key challenge hindering the mass adoption of Lithium-ion and other next-gen chemistries in advanced battery applications such as hybrid/electric vehicles (xEVs) has been management of their functional performance for more effective battery utilization and control over their life. Contemporary battery management systems (BMS) reliant on monitoring external parameters such as voltage and current to ensure safe battery operation with the required performance usually result in overdesign and inefficient use of capacity. More informative embedded sensors are desirable for internal cell state monitoring, which could provide accurate state-of-charge (SOC) and state-of-health (SOH) estimates and early failure indicators. Here we present a promising new embedded sensing option developed by our team for cell monitoring, fiber-optic sensors. High-performance large-format pouch cells with embedded fiber-optic sensors were fabricated. This second part of the paper focuses on the internal signals obtained from these FO sensors. The details of the method to isolate intercalation strain and temperature signals are discussed. Data collected under various xEV operational conditions are presented. An algorithm employing dynamic time warping and Kalman filtering was used to estimate state-of-charge with high accuracy from these internal FO signals. Their utility for high-accuracy, predictive state-of-health estimation is also explored.

Printed Carbon Nanotube Gas Sensor Arrays for Natural Gas Leak Detection (invited)

David Eric Schwartz, Chris Paulson and Victor Beck — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Methane is a potent global warming gas and fugitive natural gas is a significant contributor to climate forcing. Mitigation of this threat requires an inexpensive monitoring solution that can be deployed at natural gas wells, compressor stations, and processing facilities, as well as along pipelines. With support from ARPA-E, PARC and NASA Ames Research Center are developing a low-cost, high-performance natural gas well leak detection system based on printed nanomaterials. The system uses distributed arrays of chemical sensors containing variously-modified carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to achieve high sensitivity and high selectivity for methane and other components of natural gas, as well as potential interfering gases. Target gases includes methane, other low-molecular-weight alkanes, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia, among others. Sensitivities down to below 1 part per million (1 ppm) for methane and other gases are possible because of the high surface area of the CNTs. The sensors operate at room temperature, and consume very low power, on the order of microwatts. Selectivity is achieved through advanced pattern-matching algorithms. The sensors can achieve extremely low cost through print manufacturing. Leak localization and leak rate estimation are accessible with physics-based probabilistic modeling supported by computational fluid dynamics as well as wind tunnel simulations of gas plume formation and dispersion. A self-forming wireless communication network allows low-effort commissioning and remote data analysis. The sensor system can be broadly applied at upstream, midstream, and downstream facilities. It also can be adapted to other gases and gas combinations, and utilized for industrial and residential safety, air quality monitoring, and other applications. An overview of the sensor system as well as recent technical results will be presented.