Seminar Series Archive

A recent initiative of the US Army Research Labs funded a prospective 10 year, $50M effort to develop an Internet of “Battlefield” Things. The work envisions an upcoming frontier for rapidly reconfigurable distributed services and analytics that reduce the toll of military operations. It is largely motivated by the need for “military things” to operate at a higher degree of autonomy and configurability, while possessing sufficient intelligence to offer value to the mission even when communication with command and control is scarce or disrupted. In civilian scenarios, significant efficiencies were gained from interconnecting devices into networked services and applications that automate much of everyday life from smart homes to intelligent transportation. The ecosystem of such applications and services is collectively called the Internet of Things (IoT). Can similar benefits be gained in a military context by developing an IoT for the battlefield that supports autonomy, configurability, adaptation, and intelligence? This talk (by the lead investigator of the project) describes a future research agenda and challenges in such a context as well as potential risks, mitigation strategies, and benefits.

Tarek Abdelzaher received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999 on Quality of Service Adaptation in Real-Time Systems. He is currently a Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has authored/coauthored more than 250 refereed publications in real-time computing, distributed systems, sensor networks, and control. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems, and has served as Associate Editor on several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks, and the Ad Hoc Networks Journal. He chaired conferences in his area including RTAS, RTSS, IPSN, Sensys, DCoSS, ICDCS, and ICAC. Abdelzaher’s research interests lie broadly in understanding and influencing performance and temporal properties of networked embedded, social and software systems in the face of increasing complexity, distribution, and degree of interaction with an external physical environment. Since 2017, he is the director of the Internet of Battlefield Things Collaborative Technology Alliance. Tarek Abdelzaher is a recipient of the IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award in Real-time Systems (2012), the Xerox Award for Faculty Research (2011), as well as several best paper awards. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.