About Us
The National Science Foundation CREST Center for Multidisciplinary Research Excellence in Cyber-physical Infrastructure Systems (MECIS) was established in Fall 2021 and operates as a consortium of four institutions: The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) – Lead Institution, University of California Riverside, University of Illinois Chicago, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The lead institution is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a Title V Hispanic-Serving Institution, with 90% Hispanic enrollment.
The research conducted by the MECIS is organized in three synergistic subprojects, namely,
- Autonomy, which advances and transforms multidisciplinary knowledge in autonomous transportation infrastructure, encompassing computer vision, navigation and control, human-computer interaction, field and model-based testing, traffic network effects, and public acceptance and policy issues of autonomous transportation infrastructure systems;
- Sensors, which pushes the frontiers of sensing-enabled autonomous systems perception and smart infrastructure health monitoring through sensor design and deployment, encompassing computational simulation of sensor materials, chemical synthesis of sensor materials, 3D printing of sensor materials, 3D printing of lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles, and data-driven methods for infrastructure health prognostic and preventive maintenance; and
- Artificial intelligence, which contributes to the state-of-the-art in AI-driven data management for cleaning, integration, compression, and retrieval of big data acquired from sensors, on one hand, and AI-empowered inference- and decision-making to provide actionable information for autonomous system operations, on the other hand.