CISE Students Win CSS TC 2024 Outstanding Student Paper Prize

By Brendan Galvin, CISE Staff Writer

The committee for the Outstanding Student Paper Prize 2024 announced this year’s prestigious award recipients. Among six national nominations, one paper written by two CISE students stood out for its innovative contributions to the field of smart cities. Ehsan Sabouni and H.M. Sabbir Ahmad and their collaborators are exemplars of academic excellence and collaborative spirit. Their achievement not only highlights individual brilliance but also celebrates the collective efforts of the intelligent cities community in advancing urban innovation.

The Control Systems Society Technical Committee (CSS TC), an organization within the IEEE Control Systems Society, is dedicated to the advancement of control systems engineering. The CSS TC consists of various subcommittees and working groups, each focused on specific areas within control systems, such as robotics, automotive control, power systems, and aerospace with the aim of promoting research, development, and the dissemination of knowledge in these specialized areas through organizing conferences, workshops, and publications..

Sabouni, a fourth-year PhD student in the CODES Lab under the supervision of Distinguished Professor and Head of the Division of Systems Engineering Christos Cassandras, has an extensive research background in multi-agent control, reinforcement learning, and cybersecurity of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). He is working towards addressing problems in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Ahmad is part of the Dependable Computing Lab and the CODES Lab and has been working under the supervision of Professor Wenchao Li and Professor Cassandras to tackle the problems of safety and security of Cyber-Physical Systems, specifically intelligent transportation systems, including autonomous and connected vehicles.

“We feel extremely honored to have received the IEEE CSS TC Outstanding Student Paper Award for 2024 for work on smart cities ” Ahmad said. “It is highly encouraging to receive acknowledgment and acclaim from the community for our work.”

The two CISE students’ collaborative effort on “Optimal Control of Connected Automated Vehicles with Event-Triggered Control Barrier Functions: a Test Bed for Safe Optimal Merging” represents a significant advancement in connected automated vehicles (CAVs), addressing critical issues related to safety and efficiency in urban transportation networks, as well as coordination between vehicles to limit accidents.

“[Safety and coordination] problems are challenging, as vehicles arriving from different roads traverse through shared regions in the road network, thus necessitating real-time coordination to ensure safe navigation,” Ahmad said. “We proposed a distributed multi-agent control approach based on event-triggered control and validated our approach using a lab testbed.” A multi-agent approach includes robots or sensors that work together without a central controller by making decisions independently based on outside events. This approach, event-triggered control, helps save resources by acting only when necessary events occur.

Sabouni and Ahmad’s research represents a significant advancement in the field of intelligent transportation systems, offering a promising solution for enhancing the safety and efficiency of driving in urban environments. Their innovative approach and real-world applications contributed to their recognition and the award of the Outstanding Student Paper Prize 2024 by the CSS TC on smart cities.