SCyPSCenter for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems, UMass Lowell
Make a Gift

Research thrusts

Connected transportation, health, and infrastructure

What does this loop look like in a hospital, on a highway, on a bridge, and inside a reactor building?

The same sense-communicate-decide-act loop shows up wherever computation meets a physical system, and each domain stresses it differently: latency on a highway, privacy in a hospital, harsh environments on a bridge, regulation in a nuclear facility. The center's breadth across colleges is what lets it work in all four.

What the group builds

Intelligent traffic and vehicular computing

Connected and automated vehicles, trajectory prediction, crosswalk and roadway condition assessment from aerial imagery, and the networks that carry it.

Medical imaging and digital health

Image reconstruction from limited data, multimodal deep learning, and platforms that move clinical data safely.

Structural health monitoring

Sensing and diagnostics for wind turbine blades, bridges, and buildings, including acoustic and vibration methods and drone-based inspection.

Nuclear security and robotics

Safeguards modeling, security of nuclear facilities, and robotic platforms for environments people should not enter.

Recent papers

The newest work from the faculty on this thrust. 62 papers since 2019 carry one of their names.

  1. X. Yan, Z. Bhuyan, J. Oke, G. Wu, Y. Xie
    A two-stage detection and segmentation framework for pedestrian crosswalk inventory and condition assessment from aerial imagery
    Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 182, art. 115851, Oct. 2026IF 7.5 (2023)
  2. A. Moeinaddini, Y. Chen, T. Zhang, Y. Xie, Y. Zou
    Hybrid transformer and large language model framework for lane-level short-term travel time prediction
    Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 182, art. 115838, Oct. 2026IF 7.5 (2023)
  3. C. Pozzi, C. Ng, S. Lyon, Y. Luo, C. Niezrecki, M. Inalpolat
    A Novel Distributed Sensor Network to Assess Wind Turbine Blade Acoustics for Structural Health Monitoring
    Wind Energy, vol. 29, no. 10, Sept. 2026IF 4.1 (2023)
  4. X. Yan, Y. Xie, Z. Bhuyan, B. Xiang, G. Wu, M. Shirazi
    Merging behavior under varying work zone sign scenarios: A heterogeneity-based analysis
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 235, art. 108614, Sept. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)
  5. A. Moeinaddini, T. Zhang, C. D’Agostino, Y. Xie, Y. Zou
    Accounting for under-reporting in wildlife–vehicle collision hotspot identification using copulas and Bayesian model averaging
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 233, art. 108583, Aug. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)
  6. S. Xu, Y. Chen, Y. Xie, C. Wang
    Quantifying the safety effects of left-turn signal control mode: A heterogeneous causal inference framework
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 233, art. 108549, Aug. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)
  7. T. Miskell, Y. Luo, P. Li, S. W. Lim
    LLM Based Static Malware Analysis for Windows Portable Executables
    35th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), pp. 1-6, July 2026
  8. G. Wu, X. Yan, Y. Zou, Y. Xie
    From crash reports to safer roads: a multimodal framework integrating vision-language models and street view analysis
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 228, art. 108419, Apr. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)

All publications

Other thrusts

Most projects cut across two or three of them.

Smart grid cybersecurity and resilienceAI and agentic systems for cyber-physical controlNext-generation optical and 6G transportFault-tolerant distributed and edge computingHardware security and high performance computingNuclear energy and security