Missouri University of Science and Technology is partnering with several other universities to offer a workshop on “Bridging the Cyber, Physical and Social Worlds” May 27-28 in Kansas City, Mo. The workshop is funded as part of the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical Systems effort.

Cyber-physical systems consist of the class of large-scale infrastructures that have significant cyber and physical components, such as automated traffic control and healthcare monitoring systems.

NSF is conducting a major initiative in developing cyber-physical systems that bridge computer science and engineering fields. The workshop in Kansas City is an opportunity to set an agenda for NSF and help create a vision of how a cyber-physical system program could encompass the social sciences along with computer science and engineering.

Two Missouri S&T faculty members are on the workshop’s planning committee: Dr. Bruce McMillin, professor of computer science, and Dr. Mariesa Crow, the Fred W. Finley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at S&T.

“The workshop is an exciting opportunity to bring traditionally disparate disciplines together to develop theories that bridge the various disciplines,” says McMillin. “Engineers think differently than computer scientists who, in turn, think differently than social scientists.”

The workshop aims to identify features of existing theories that may be applied to relate the various disciplines and break down the barriers among the different schools of thought. Researchers hope this will lead to new areas of research and provide more comprehensive solutions to societal-technical problems.

Partners in this workshop include Missouri S&T, the Great Plains Network, Kansas State University and Washington University in St. Louis.

A limited number of fellowships are available for promising undergraduate researchers with an interest in cyber physical systems. Applications should be sent to McMillin by April 1.

For more information, contact McMillin at ff@mst.edu.