Smart Cities Research

Technology to make urban and rural areas safer, more resilient, and more efficient.

Link Lab’s work encompasses the full volume, variety, and velocity of data created by the Internet of Things. Utilizing open systems of sensors, software, and effectors, our work explores impacts across built, natural, mobility, and societal environments.

Research Projects

  • Data Driven Management for Stormwater

    Data Driven Management for Stormwater

    Jon Goodall | Donna Chen | Madhur Behi | Brad Campbell | Kamin Whitehouse| Mike Gorman

    Focus is on developing models of incidental and recurrent flooding in Norfolk, VA that can assist managers and citizens  READ MORE
     

    PUBLICATIONS

    Exploring Real-time Control of Stormwater Systems for Sea Level Rise JM Sadler, JL Goodall, M Behl, BD Bowes, MM Morsy Journal of Hydrology, 124571
    Nuisance Flooding in Coastal Communities: Real-time Modeling and Decision Support to Improve Transportation Infrastructure Resilience

  • Vibration Intelligence in Cyber-Physical systems

    John Stankovic

    In addition to everything’s natural vibration frequency, all human activity causes vibration. With AI, we can understand and utilize the features (amplitude, frequency) and phenomena (resonance, dispersion, doppler effect) of vibration and apply this knowledge in areas such as smart homes, smart health, wearable interfaces, and security.   READ MORE >

    “ViType: A Cost Efficient On-body Typing System through Vibration” Wenqiang Chen, Maoning Guan, Yandao Huang, Lu Wang, Rukhsana Ruby, Wen Hu, Kaishun Wu. IEEE SECON, 2018. (BEST PAPER AWARD)
    “Taprint: Secure Text Input for Commodity Smart Wearables” Wenqiang Chen, Lin Chen, Yandao Huang, Xinyu Zhang, Lu Wang, Rukhsana Ruby, Kaishun Wu. ACM Mobicom, 2019.

     

  • Conflict Detection and Resolution Among Smart Services

    John Stankovic | Lu Feng

    IoT platforms enable and integrate smart services, improving city performance in many domains. However, safety issues arising from the integration of smart services are not adequately addressed. CityGuard is a safety-aware watchdog that detects and resolves conflicts among different services based on safety and performance requirements. READ MORE

    PUBLICATIONS

    Detection of Runtime Conflicts among Services in Smart Cities Ma, Meiyi, S. Masud Preum, W. Tärneberg, M. Ahmed, M. Ruiters, and J. Stankovic 2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP)

    CityGuard: A Watchdog for Safety-Aware Conflict Detection in Smart Cities Ma, Meiyi, Sarah Masud Preum, and John A. Stankovic. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI)

  • Integrating Formal Methods and Machine Learning

    John Stankovic | Lu Feng

    Monitoring a city’s safety and performance collectively is crucial, yet challenging due to many potential conflicts among the integration of increasing number of services deployed independently in smart cities. In our work, we build a decision support system to detect and resolve conflicts among smart services at runtime. READ MORE

    PUBLICATIONS

    SaSTL: Spatial Aggregation Signal Temporal Logic for Runtime Monitoring in Smart Cities Meiyi Ma, Ezio Bartocci, Eli Lifland, John Stankovic, Lu Feng 2020 ACM/IEEE 11th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS)

    CityResolver: A decision support system for conflict resolution in smart cities Meiyi Ma, John Stankovic, Lu Feng 2018 ACM/IEEE 9th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS)

  • Exploring Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) to Enable Connected Transportation Services

    Haiying (Helen) Shen  | Brian Smith

    With recent advances in the connected vehicle program pointing to a transition from research to deployment, there is a significant risk that the resulting system will provide incomplete coverage of roadways, and also not serve the large number of non-motorized travelers in the system.  This is primarily due to the reliance on traditional infrastructure-dependent wireless networks.  To address this risk, this project aims to fully investigate the use of MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks) to allow for a connected transportation system that meets the needs of all travelers. READ MORE

  • A Smart Building for Enhancing Human Performance, Comfort and Health

    Haiying (Helen) Shen | Cameron (Kamin) Whitehouse | Laura Barnes | Benjamin Converse

    The proposed project aims to build a human-centered context-aware responsive smart building that can provide personalized services to enhance the performance, comfort and health of occupants. The novelty of this project lies in its leveraging human behaviors in addition to the data from the physical world to provide context-aware automatic and personalized services that can better meet human needs. This smart building is unique by two features: 1) it provides personalized service rather than a universal service for all users; and 2) the building can automatically make context-aware adjustments to proactively meet user needs. This project consists of two innovations: 1) Social-based Context-aware Prediction/Response, and 2) Environmental Control for Human Health. READ MORE

  • Edge Computing for IoT

    gateway2 - Brad Campbell.jpg

    Brad Campbell

    To support the Internet of Things on the edge, this project uses existing IoT gateways for scalable, heterogeneous compute for thousands of devices and applications. We envision edge computing that is cost-effective, scalable, and privacy-aware, without the dependence on cloud. READ MORE

    PUBLICATIONS

    PhD Forum Abstract: Untangling the Cloud from Edge Computing for IoT; Nabeel Nasir; University of Virginia

    Enabling Elasticity on the Edge using Heterogeneous Gateways; Nabeel Nasir, Bradford Campbell; SenSys '21: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems | November 2021 | Pages 395-396