Assistant Professor of Computer Science Marco Levorato and Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Solmaz Kia have received a $500,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Smart and Autonomous Systems program. The project, “Cognitive and Reflective Monitoring Systems for Urban Environments,” investigates an innovative urban IoT-based monitoring architecture for smart cities. In the envisioned system, mobile drones and sensors interoperate with the layered citywide networking and computation infrastructure to jointly optimize distributed data acquisition, transportation and processing, as well as drones’ navigation. The project leverages recent IoT architectures such as fog and edge computing, and introduces a new notion of architecture level intelligence for mobile sensor networks.