S. Shankar Sastry, the Roy Carlson Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of California-Berkeley, will deliver the 2010 Eliahu I. and Joyce Jury Seminar on “Societal Case Cyber-Physical Systems: Action Webs and Beyond” on Friday, December 3, at 2:30 p.m. in the McArthur Engineering Annex, Room MEA 202. Professor Sastry has served as the director of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology in the Interests of Society), an interdisciplinary center spanning several UC campuses; chairman of UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences; director of DARPA’s Information Technology Office; and director of Berkeley’s Electronics Research Laboratory. He has helped establish a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center called TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies). In 2007 Professor Sastry was appointed the faculty director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

While the primary use of sensor networks to date has been on information gathering, the greatest impact of sensor webs will be from what are referred to as action webs, involving “closing the loop” around networked embedded systems. These action webs are now being used in a large number of societal scale cyber-physical systems (physical infrastructures, energy and building infrastructures, etc.), and they bring into focus the real time constraint issues inherent in networked embedded systems. The talk will focus on recent research activities that form the intellectual core in the study of cyber-physical systems.

For more information, please contact Kamal Premaratne at [email protected] or 305-284-4051.