Majid Zamani

Associate Professor Majid Zamani wins second grant from EU

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 23:06:44 +0000

Associate Professor Majid Zamani wins second grant from EU Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/23/2024 - 16:06

Grace Wilson

Associate Professor Majid Zamani was recently recognized by the European Research Council (ERC) for the second time through a Proof of Concept grant for his Advanced Collision Avoidance System (ACAS), which could give a formal guarantee of safety for autonomous vehicles. Learn more about his work and what this grant will help him achieve in this Q+A.

How does it feel to be recognized by the ERC twice now?

I am honored and grateful to have been awarded both an ERC Starting Grant in the past and, more recently, an ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant. This dual recognition underscores the potential impact and feasibility of my research focused on designing autonomous systems with an emphasis on guaranteeing their safety. I am genuinely excited about the opportunities these grants provide to contribute meaningfully to the design of autonomous systems. The ability to ensure their safety, utilizing tools from mathematics, computer science, and engineering, adds a critical dimension to my work. I look forward to leveraging these resources to advance the field and make significant contributions to the development of autonomous systems that prioritize both innovation and safety.

What work does this grant allow you to fund specifically?

The primary objective of my ERC Proof of Concept project is to provide car manufacturers with a correct-by-design Advanced Collision Avoidance Systems (ACAS) that carries a guarantee of correctness. By adopting our ACAS solution, automotive companies can substantially decrease the volume of testing needed, achieving efficiency gains by several orders of magnitude. This will be accomplished through the establishment of a software development framework that automates the generation of ACAS control software and ensures the robustness and reliability of the generated control software.

What are your hopes for this project overall?

I hope to see this project make significant contributions to the broader goals of enhancing road safety, reducing testing burdens for self-driving car companies, and ultimately promoting greater accessibility to innovative and robust ACAS technology within the automotive industry. Additionally, I expect that the project outcomes, including the release of high-quality software tools, will foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing within the research community, thereby accelerating advancements in the design of autonomous systems.

What is important for readers to know?

For readers to fully grasp the significance of my project on designing ACAS, it's crucial to understand that the primary focus is on incorporating a formal guarantee of safety into these systems. This means that the project is dedicated to ensuring a robust and reliable collision avoidance mechanism through a formalized approach.

It's important to emphasize that the integration of formal guarantees distinguishes this project, elevating the safety standards of collision avoidance systems. Readers should be aware that this formalized approach not only enhances the effectiveness of the systems but also sets a new benchmark for safety assurance in autonomous technologies.

Furthermore, readers should know that the outcomes of this project hold the potential to reshape safety standards in the automotive industry. The incorporation of formal guarantees is a pivotal step towards building trust in collision avoidance systems, fostering a safer environment for both drivers and pedestrians. Overall, the project is not just about innovation but about establishing a new paradigm in safety within the realm of autonomous systems.

Learn more about Zamani's grant.

Zamani was recently recognized by the European Research Council (ERC) for the second time for his Advanced Collision Avoidance System (ACAS) that could give a formal guarantee of safety for autonomous vehicles.

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Professor recognized for transformative control theorem

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:47:34 +0000

Professor recognized for transformative control theorem Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/18/2023 - 12:47

Grace Wilson

Associate Professor of Computer Science Majid Zamani and co-authors have accepted the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Society George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award — an honor with a legacy spanning five decades — for the paper entitled "A Lyapunov-based small-gain theorem for infinite networks."

"As a scientist in the field of control theory, this is one of my dream awards. It's the highest recognition I've received in this field. The people who have won this award in the past are pioneers of the field, and I'm thrilled to be acknowledged alongside them," Zamani said.

The paper takes a transformative view. Previously, scientists had been able to show that stability analysis of large but finite interconnected networks, such as power grids or traffic flow, can be tackled by breaking the networks down into their parts — say, the traffic on a single road — and checking the stability of those parts.

However, this divide-and-conquer strategy had never been comprehensively theorized for infinite networks, until now.

Infinite possibilities

This matters because, as our lives become ever more interconnected, we still want to be able to make promises about the systems that we control and model, no matter their complexity and size.

This theorem allows scientists to analyze systems composed of infinitely many complex components. Infinite networks naturally arise as over-approximations of finite yet extremely large networks, potentially encompassing unknown numbers of subsystems.

"We needed to have a fundamental result that works for networks with infinitely many components, and this allows for that,” Zamani said. “You can look at very large-scale networks with possibly unknown numbers of subsystems as infinite networks."

The theorem has profound impacts across a vast number of fields, from control of quantum systems to consensus in social networks, systems theory and functional analysis.

"Our result actually generalizes all the existing attempts that have been made to deal with networks of infinite size," Zamani said.

A safer world

This theorem is another step toward the guarantees we need for safe, high-performing systems. Complex systems are everywhere around us, from platoons of vehicles to ocean tides and cloud flows and even how glucose flows through the bloodstream.

However, we must accept that the models we create are imperfect. When controlling a complicated system, there will always be uncertainty because real-life scenarios have too many factors to be properly modeled.

It is crucial that we can analyze the systems we construct for robustness and safety, regardless of their complexity.

New horizons

When introducing infinite networks, Zamani and his co-authors realized that many of the field's well-established results no longer hold. "Apart from the impact, in terms of a high-level mathematical problem, it was very challenging," Zamani said.

This leads to an exciting new threshold for fundamental knowledge.

"Because existing mathematical techniques don't necessarily carry over to infinite networks, you need to resort to different tools, and create new ones," Zamani said.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Majid Zamani's groundbreaking contribution allows for the analysis of infinitely complex networks, impacting fields like quantum system control and the safety of extremely large systems we use every day.

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Is the World Ready for Self-Driving Cars?

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 17:29:39 +0000

Is the World Ready for Self-Driving Cars? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/27/2023 - 10:29

Daniel Oberhaus

Autonomous vehicles are hitting the road in cities across the U.S. Can they be trusted? Researchers from the Department of Computer Science weigh in. External link to the Coloradan Alumni Magazine.

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Video: Working Toward Safer Autonomous Systems

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 04:04:18 +0000

Video: Working Toward Safer Autonomous Systems Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/16/2023 - 21:04

Majid Zamani is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and leads the Hybrid Control Systems Lab. His research interests include verification and control of cyber-physical systems, hybrid systems, embedded control software synthesis, networked control systems and incremental properties of nonlinear control systems. His work helps protect human life through safer autonomous systems.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7PhhikE3lk]

Majid Zamani is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. He leads the Hybrid Control Systems Lab and helps protect human life through safer autonomous systems.

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CU Boulder part of $5.8M grant to improve cyber-physical transportation systems

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 06:00:00 +0000

CU Boulder part of $5.8M grant to improve cyber-physical transportation systems Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/29/2022 - 00:00

CS assistant professor Majid Zamani and his team are part of a new $5.8M grant from the NSF to help build the intelligent transportation systems of the future.

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Zamani CAREER award to bridge the gap between industry and academia in autonomous systems

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 18:53:20 +0000

Zamani CAREER award to bridge the gap between industry and academia in autonomous systems Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/24/2022 - 12:53

Grace Wilson

Majid Zamani, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at CU Boulder, wants to use real-life data, rather than mathematical models, to study and control autonomous systems with both software and physical components, bridging the gap between academia and industry and ensuring safety for all users.

He has just been presented with a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his proposal entitled “A Data-Driven Approach for Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems.”

CAREER awards provide funding over five years to support the research and educational activities of early career faculty members who have the potential to become leaders in their field. Six faculty members within the College of Engineering and Applied Science received CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation in 2022.

Zamani said his CAREER award unifies three different fields: formal methods in computer science, optimization in operation research and control theory. The research brings insight from each to understand how to verify the safety of autonomous systems purely through data analysis.

"If I have enough data collected, I can work directly with the data to systematically generate the software code in charge of controlling a system," Zamani said.

Currently, rigid mathematical models that describe the behaviors of a system are the main ingredients of most academic research in ensuring safety in cyber-physical systems–- systems where software interacts tightly with physical systems—such as self-driving cars, pacemakers and power networks.

To have these mathematical models, someone must rigorously model every part of the system. When you have thousands of different components in a machine and possibly hundreds of computer program interactions, the layers of complexity stack exponentially and it is very hard to build the models accurately. Even if the models are computed, Zamani said, they are too complex to be dealt with.

With his CAREER award, Zamani will be working to entirely bypass the need for such a model of the system. This means that systems that are too complex for us to know their internal workings, known as "black boxes," can still be formally guaranteed as safe.

Safety is a constant concern when computer programs can impact the physical world. A single catastrophic safety failure in a cyber-physical system could cause trust in the autonomous system to be lost and lead to loss of life or infrastructure.

Despite the need for safety, many self-driving car industries do not have the time or interest to mathematically model their systems, Zamani said.

"You approach a company and they say, 'no, we don't have a model. We have the actual car or its simulator, but we don't know the precise mathematical model for it,'" Zamani said.

Zamani's award centers around the recent advances in inexpensive sensor technologies that can gather large amounts of data from a system's behaviors as it is run without autonomy, like when a person drives a car destined for autopilot.

Zamani said that, while they may not have models, industry partners do have large amounts of data available, making it possible to rigorously analyze realistic systems and build a "controller," the software code that autonomously controls the system, such as an auto-pilot in a self-driving car.

The framework that Zamani is crafting is also not system-dependent. Rather than needing a separate way of understanding self-driving cars, drones or medical devices, his work is abstracting the logic needed to create algorithms for controlling all these types of systems.

In addition, safety can mean different things to different people. Zamani's work allows companies to decide how conservative their safety confidence levels should be. The more data collected, the higher the confidence levels Zamani's framework is able to guarantee.

And, as well as determining what level of safety is necessary, the research supports a variety of "properties of interest." For example, if a car is safe only if it doesn't crash, it might speed past the speed-limit regularly, but by adding a property that requires the car to also follow the speed-limit, you craft a controller that accommodates both properties of interest.

This system-agnostic, flexible and data-driven framework provides an alternative to the severe computational complexity of rigid mathematical models and strong assumptions made about them that have caused a divide between academia and industry.

"The main goal of my CAREER award is closing the gap between what happens in reality and the theoretical, rigorous analyses which happen in academia. People in industry are not using the techniques we've been developing in academia. There is a gap between their assumptions and ours, and this work is trying to help close it." Zamani said.

Zamani wants to use real-life data, rather than mathematical models, to study and control autonomous systems with both software and physical components, bridging the gap between academia and industry and ensuring safety for all users.

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NSF grants aim to improve security and safety of autonomous cars and systems

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

NSF grants aim to improve security and safety of autonomous cars and systems Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/29/2020 - 18:00

Researchers at CU Boulder, including Majid Zamani and Ashutosh Trivedi from computer science, are leading four new NSF-funded projects.

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