Context-Aware Safety Monitoring in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems – Homa Alemzadeh

Computer Science Seminar Series
November 17, 2020

“Context-Aware Safety Monitoring in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems”
Homa Alemzadeh, University of Virginia

Rapid advances in computing, networking, and sensing technologies have resulted in ubiquitous deployment of medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS) in various clinical and personalized settings. However, with the growing complexity and connectivity of software, the increasing use of artificial intelligence for control and decision-making, and the inevitable involvement of human operators in supervision and control of MCPS, there are still significant challenges in ensuring their safety and security. In this talk, Homa Alemzadeh will present her recent work on the design of context-aware safety monitors that can be integrated with an MCPS controller and that can detect the early signs of adverse events through real-time analysis of measurements from operational, cyber, and physical layers of the system. Her proposed monitors are evaluated on a real-world system for robot-assisted surgery and are shown to be effective in the timely detection of unsafe control actions caused by accidental faults, unintentional human errors, or malicious attacks in cyberspace before they manifest in the physical system and lead to adverse consequences and harm to patients.

Homa Alemzadeh is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science at the University of Virginia. She is also a member of the Link Lab, a multidisciplinary center for research and education in cyber-physical systems (CPS). Before joining UVA, she was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Alemzadeh received her PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her BSc and MSc degrees in computer engineering from the University of Tehran. Her research interests are at the intersection of computer systems dependability and data science, in particular data-driven resilience assessment and design of CPS with applications to medical devices, surgical robots, and autonomous systems. She is the recipient of the 2017 William C. Carter PhD Dissertation Award in Dependability from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Committee on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance and the International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. Her work on the analysis of safety incidents in robotic surgery was selected as the Maxwell Chamberlain Memorial Paper at the 50th annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons  and was featured in The Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and on the BBC, among other outlets.