Keynote Speakers

A new economy built on the massive growth of endpoints on the internet will require precise and verifiable timing in ways that current systems do not support. Perhaps the Internet of Things is the core of this new economy. Three aspects of timing that need development are synchronization, processing, and latency. Synchronization describes the delivery of frequency, phase or time from a source to an endpoint. Processing describes the consumption of synchronization. And latency describes the delay from transmission to reception of a number of types of time-sensitive packets.

Synchronization is delivered to users by GPS and GNSS with great accuracy and across wide areas. But there are significant problems, such as jamming, spoofing and the inability to receive the signal indoors. Synchronization is also delivered through networks. But networks have been built to optimize data transfer in ways that severely impede time and frequency transfer. For example, nodes that store and forward data create unpredictable delays that result in poor timing for the endpoints.

State-of-the-art processing systems currently use timing only as a performance metric. Correctness of timing as a metric cannot currently be designed into systems independent of hardware and/or software implementations. Creating processing systems that support precision timing is currently labor intensive, requiring a cycle of designing, building, calibrating, then adjusting hardware and software and re-calibrating repetitively until timing meets requirements.

Time-sensitive data must be delivered with deterministic latencies. Three kinds of time intervals that can be required are 1) delivering packets within a time interval bound, 2) delivering packets with a specific delay, and 3) delivering a packet to arrive at an absolute time. In order to make the delay in delivering such time-sensitive data predictable, management systems must control scheduling and bandwidth.

To enable the massive growth predicted, accurate timing needs cross-disciplinary research to address each of these issues. This talk will suggest some potential solutions to meet these challenges and support the kind of growth we hope for.

Dr. Marc Weiss who worked at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1979, specializing in time transfer techniques and statistics of timing systems, has now been a contractor for NIST since 2014.  He received the National Bureau of Standards (NBS – the former name of NIST) Applied Research Award for a first GPS timing receiver in 1983. He was awarded a patent for the Smart Clock algorithm in 1993.  Dr. Weiss won the 2013 NIST William P. Slichter Award for linking NIST with industry, in large part because of WSTS and ITSF.  Marc founded and has led WSTS, the Workshop on Sync and Timing Systems in North America, annually since 1992, which inspired ITSF as a European sister conference. He also co-founded in 2013 a research collaboration on Time-Aware Applications, Computers and Communications Systems.  Marc is the NIST co-chair of the Timing subgroup of the NIST Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group, and led the NIST program to support GPS in developing their clocks and timing systems from 1980 until his retirement at the end of 2013.  Marc also has worked on and published Relativity issues as they relate to GPS and to primary frequency standards.

In this talk, I will argue that deterministic models have historically proven extremely valuable in engineering, despite fundamental limits. But useful deterministic models for cyber-physical systems, which integrate computing, networking, and physical dynamics, remain elusive primarily because of the lack of temporal semantics on the cyber side. I show that useful deterministic models for CPS are both possible and practical. I will examine particularly the mechanisms by which time can be modeled in such systems and how such models of time can be faithfully realized in engineered systems.

Edward A. Lee is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. He is the author of Plato and the Nerd - The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology (MIT Press, 2017), a number of textbooks and research monographs, and more than 300 papers and technical reports. Lee has delivered more than 170 keynote talks and other invited talks at venues worldwide and has graduated at least 35 PhD students. Professor Lee's research group studies cyber-physical systems, which integrate physical dynamics with software and networks. His focus is on the use of deterministic models as a central part of the engineering toolkit for such systems. He is the director of the nine-university TerraSwarm Research Center (http://terraswarm.org), a director of iCyPhy, the Berkeley Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center, and the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy project. From 2005-2008, he served as chair of the EE Division and then chair of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He has led the development of several influential open-source software packages, notably Ptolemy and its various spinoffs. He received his BS degree in 1979 from Yale University, with a double major in Computer Science and Engineering and Applied Science, an SM degree in EECS from MIT in 1981, and a PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1986. From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education, and received the 2016 Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems (TCRTS).

We expected the attractive force of gravity to slow down the rate at which the Universe is expanding. But observations of very distant exploding stars (supernovae) show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up, an amazing discovery that was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. Over the largest distances, the Universe seems to be dominated by a mysterious, repulsive “dark energy” that stretches space itself faster and faster. The physical origin and nature of dark energy, which makes up about 70% of the contents of the Universe, may be the most important unsolved problem in all of physics, providing clues to a unified quantum theory of gravity. But our most recent measurements yield an additional surprise: the current rate of expansion is even faster than expected, perhaps showing that dark energy is actually growing stronger with time or revealing the presence of a new type of relativistic particle.

Alex Filippenko, an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is one of the world's most highly cited astronomers. He is the recipient of numerous prizes for his scientific research, and he was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the Nobel-worthy accelerating expansion of the Universe. In 2017, he was selected for the Caltech Distinguished Alumnus Award. Winner of the most prestigious teaching awards at UC Berkeley and voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record 9 times, he was named the U.S. National Professor of the Year in 2006. He has produced 5 astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appears in more than 100 TV documentaries. He has given about 1000 public presentations, and he was awarded the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. He is addicted to observing total solar eclipses throughout the globe (15 so far, all successfully).