From surveillance tools to autonomous machines, countries around the world are ramping up their military artificial intelligence (AI) assets. Such robust technologies are necessary to protect the United States from surprise attacks, which occur these days not only on the ground, but also on the cloud.

Advancing AI-based autonomous systems for military use will be the goal for a team of UMBC researchers that has recently been awarded a $20-million subcontract. UMBC will partner with the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), and the DEVCOM Army Research Lab (ARL) on the $68-million, five-year endeavor, which ARL is funding. The goal is to strengthen army AI technology so it is able to meet the demands of today’s national defense.

Technology succeeds when it is for the people. People centric sensing plays a major role in this context.

The explosion of sensors and mobile phones and their interaction with human life funnel a phenomenal amount of data through pervasive computing environments. This data carries a lot of meaningful but hidden information about the people and their environments. The MPSC group at UMBC analyze those data in an efficient manner, uncover those hidden patterns, gauge the activity, behavior and interaction of the users and present this to the users, society or application to understand the human and system behavior better.

Analyzing these data trails can support different applications in a novel way. The applications may vary from personal and community healthcare (smart home independent living, fitness and exercising), green computing (building energy management, environment monitoring), urban sensing (intelligent transportation system, natural resource management), marketing industry (advertisement, consumer shopping habits) and after all social networking.

We particularly look into sensor data processing and data quality, sensor communications and energy management, sensor-based data mining and machine learning techniques, and intelligent decision making process to observe and shape the user life. We do research and development for the people centric applications and systems which help people to live their lives better.