Bio: Lothar Thiele  joined ETH Zurich, Switzerland, as a full Professor of Computer Engineering, in 1994.
His research interests include models, methods and software tools for the design of embedded systems, cyberphysical systems, sensor networks, embedded software and bioinspired optimization techniques.
Lothar Thiele is associate editor of INTEGRATION - the VLSI Journal, Journal of Signal Processing Systems, IEEE Transaction on Industrial Informatics, Journal of Systems Architecture, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Real-Time Systems, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, and ACM Transactions on Cyberphysical Systems.
In 1986 he received the "Dissertation Award" of the Technical University of Munich, in 1987, the "Outstanding Young Author Award" of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, in 1988, the Browder J. Thompson Memorial Award of the IEEE, and in 2000-2001, the "IBM Faculty Partnership Award". In 2004, he joined the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Honorary Blaise Pascal Chair of University Leiden, The Netherlands. Since 2009 he is a member of the Foundation Board of Hasler Foundation, Switzerland. Since 2010, he is a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2013, he joined the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Lothar Thiele received the "EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2015. Since 2017, Lothar Thiele is Associate Vice President of ETH for Digital Transformation.

Abstract of the talk: If visions and forecasts of industry come true then we will be soon surrounded by billions of interconnected embedded devices. We will interact with them in a cyber-human symbiosis, they will not only observe us but also our environment, and they will be part of many visible and ubiquitous objects around us. We have the legitimate expectation that the individual devices as well as the overall system behaves in a reliable and predictable manner. This is an indispensable requirement as it is infeasible to constantly maintain such a large set of devices. In addition, there are many application domains where we rely on a correct and fault-free system behavior. We expect trustworthy results from sensing, computation, communication and actuation due to economic importance or even catastrophic consequences if the overall system is not working correctly, e.g., in industrial automation, distributed control of energy systems, surveillance, medical applications, or early warning scenarios in the context of building safety or environmental catastrophes. Finally, trustworthiness and reliability are mandatory for the societal acceptance of human-cyber interaction and cooperation. It will be argued that we need novel architectural concepts, an associated design process and validations strategies to satisfy the strongly conflicting requirements and associated design challenges of platforms for CPS: Handle at the same time limited available resources, adaptive run-time behavior, and predictability. These challenges concern all components of an IoT system, e.g., computation, storage, wireless communication, energy management, harvesting, sensing and sensor interfaces, and actuation. The talk will be driven by examples from various application domains such as smart watches, zero-power systems, environmental sensing, and air pollution sensing.

Daniel Lohmann (Leibniz University Hannover)

"Tailorable System Software for the Internet of Things: Rethinking the HW–SW Bridge"

Bio: Daniel Lohmann received his diploma (Dipl.-Inform.) from Universität Koblenz, Germany in 2002. In 2003 he joined the group of Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he received his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in 2009 and his venia legendi (Dr.-Ing. habil.) in 2014. Since 2017 he is full professor and head of the Systems Research and Architecture (SRA) group at Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Prof. Lohmann's research activities are centered around the architecture of computing systems: From hardware over system software up to languages and compilers. His work targets fundamental research for special-purpose systems that have to cope with tight demands regarding nonfunctional properties, such as noise reduction, timeliness, robustness and hardware resources. Focus is on constructive methods for the design and development of versatile (real-time) operating systems that provide an extreme degree of (automatic) tailorability towards concrete (nonfunctional) application requirements and hardware properties. Prof. Lohmann is a member of GI, EuroSys, ACM, and IEEE. https://sra.uni-hannover.de/

Abstract of the talk: System software provides no business value of its own. Its utility and sole purpose is to serve a concrete application's needs, that is, to map the functional and nonfunctional requirements of a particular software precisely and efficiently to the functional and nonfunctional properties offered by the employed hardware.
This is particularly challenging in the case of highly heterogeneous, but special-purpose systems, such as embedded control systems for the internet of things: Efficiency calls for specific, hand-crafted system software; reuseability demands generic, versatile solutions. Automatic tailoring is the key: In the talk I adress static and dynamic analysis techniques to analyze the application's specific requirements in order to automatically generate application-specific instances of system software that, in the extreme cases, could even be pushed down directly into the hardware.

Roberto Passerone (University of Trento)

"Optimization-Based Methodology for CPS Architecture Exploration and Synthesis"

Bio: Roberto Passerone is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento, Italy. He received his MS and PhD degrees in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and 2004, respectively. Before joining the University of Trento, he was Research Scientist at Cadence Design Systems. Prof. Passerone has published numerous research papers on international conferences and journals in the area of design methods for systems and integrated circuits, formal models and design methodologies for embedded systems, with particular attention to image processing and wireless sensor networks. He was track chair for the Real-Time and Networked Embedded Systems at ETFA from 2008 to 2010, and general and program chair for SIES in several editions from 2010 to 2018. He has participated to various European projects on design methodologies, including SPEEDS, SPRINT, DANSE, DALi and ACANTO, and was local coordinator for ArtistDesign, COMBEST, and CyPhERS.

Abstract of the talk: Architecture exploration of complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) is an important part of the design flow as well as one of its major challenges. This work proposes a novel exploration methodology for system architectures at a high level of abstraction. We leverage optimization techniques to select correct-by-construction configuration and interconnection of components taken from predefined libraries, while meeting a set of system requirements and minimizing a cost function. Using a graph-based representation of the system architecture, we identify a common semantic domain of exploration problems as a set of decision variables and mixed integer linear constraints over graph vertices, edges and paths. In this domain, we are able to instantiate a variety of CPS design requirements, such as interconnection, balance, timing, reliability, workload and energy. Our resulting mathematical formulation is a mixed integer linear program (MILP) that includes the topology selection problem, i.e., whether a component should be used in the final configuration and how it is connected to other components, and the mapping problem, i.e., how the topology is implemented by library components.  We have implemented ArchEx [1], an extensible toolbox that supports all steps of the proposed methodology.  We demonstrate our methodology on diverse areas of application, including an aircraft power distribution network, a reconfigurable manufacturing system and a data collection sensor network.

Abstract of the talk: Highly accurate and reliable indoor positioning---at accuracy levels in the 10~cm range---will enable a  large a number of innovative location-based applications because such accuracy levels essentially allow for a useful real-time interaction of humans and cyber-physical systems. Activity recognition, navigation at "shelf" level, geofencing, process monitoring and process control are among the envisioned services that will yield numerous applications in various domains, such as manufacturing and logistics. This talk reviews the difficulties faced by indoor positioning systems, motivating the requirement for a large signal bandwidth and how it can be compensated by multi-antenna systems. The foreseen capabilities of upcoming generations of wireless systems will increasingly make high-accuracy positioning available in near future.

Stefan Mangard (TU Graz) from Subproject 2 (Dependable Computing)

"Security Challenges in the Internet of Things"

Bio: Stefan Mangard is professor at Graz University of Technology since November 2013 and heading the secure systems group. Before he was working as leading security architect at Infineon Technologies in Munich. In this role he was responsible for defining the security concepts for all the smart card platforms. His research interests include security architectures, cryptography, as well as all kinds of side-channel attacks and corresponding countermeasures. He received an ERC consolidator grant in 2015 and he is chair of the steering committee of CHES, which is the foremost conference on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems. He is co-author of the Meltdown/Spectre attacks published in January this year.

Abstract of the talk:  While the Internet of Things (IoT) enables a huge range of novel applications, also the security challenges arising by the deployment of IoT technologies are unprecedented. In fact, IoT devices are exposed to a wide range of attacks ranging from remote attacks via the network to local physical attacks. At the same time, the value of information that is collected and processed by IoT devices is continuously rising. This talk provides an overview of IoT security challenges. Besides focusing on classical security questions and countermeasures, the talk in particular also focusses on side-channel attacks, which allow bypassing security mechanisms by exploiting properties, such as the timing behavior or the power consumption, of the underlying hardware.

Bernhard K. Aichernig (TU Graz) from Subproject 3 (Dependable Composition)

"Smart Testing of IoT Protocols - Combining Model Learning and Model-based Testing"

Bio: Bernhard K. Aichernig is a tenured associate professor at Graz University of Technology, Austria. He investigates the foundations of software engineering for realising dependable computer-based systems. Bernhard is an expert in formal methods and testing. His research covers a variety of areas combining falsification, verification and abstraction techniques. Current topics include the Internet of Things, model learning, and statistical model checking. Since 2006, he
participated in four European projects. From 2004-2016 Bernhard served as a board member of Formal Methods Europe, the association that organises the Formal Methods symposia. From 2002 to 2006 he had a faculty position at the United Nations University in Macao S.A.R., China. Bernhard holds a habilitation in Practical Computer Science and Formal Methods, a doctorate, and a diploma engineer degree from Graz University of Technology.

Abstract of the talk:  Testing has always been a challenge due to (1) its incompleteness by nature, (2) the lack of good specifications and (3) by its high demand for resources. With the growing complexity of the systems-under-test the situation is not likely to improve. The combination of model-learning with model-based testing offers an opportunity to
master this complexity. In my talk I will introduce this line of research and report about our recent results including applications in the Internet of Things.  Our goal is a natural evolution of testing: with the trend of our environment becoming "smarter", e.g. smart homes, smart cars, smart production, smart energy, our testing process needs to become smart as well. We are seeing the advent of smart testing.

Martin Horn (TU Graz) from Subproject 4 (Dependable Control)

"Sliding-Mode Control for Networked Control Systems - Theory and Applications"

Bio: From 2003 to 2008 Martin Horn was associate professor at the Institute of Automation and Control at Graz University of Technology. In 2008 he was appointed as a full professor of Control and Measurement Systems at the Faculty of Technical Sciences of Klagenfurt University. Since 2014 he is head of the Institute of Automation and Control at Graz University of Technology.

Martin’s main research areas are currently in robust and networked control theory. He participates in several international research projects. He is head of a newly founded research lab focusing on application-oriented basic research in the field of Model Based Control of Complex Testbed Systems. He is reviewer for several important journals, such as International Journal of Control, International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics or Control Engineering Practice. Martin is author and co-author of numerous journal and conference papers. He has been co-operating with a number of research groups, e.g., in Germany, Mexico and Italy.

Abstract of the talk: In networked control systems, spatially distributed plants and control algorithms are connected via shared media to reduce wiring costs and to enable increased flexibility. However, the presence of a communication network in the feedback loop makes it necessary to re-evaluate conventional control theories. Sliding-mode control is one such classical controller synthesis approach. It is known to render feedback loops immune with respect to certain classes of disturbances. This talk gives an overview of sliding-mode based algorithms for networked systems developed by our research group.