TIPPERS is a award-winning sensor data management middleware technology for the emerging smart-space applications developed as part of the DARPA program at UC Irvine. In smart space domains, application logic is best expressed at a more semantically meaningful level (i.e., closer to concepts of interest of the application), though data arrives at raw sensor level. TIPPERS  supports data to be viewed at both levels of  abstraction and provides  mechanisms to seamlessly translate concepts, data, queries across them. TIPPERS significantly reduces complexity of  application development by relieving application  logic  from having to deal with sensor capabilities, placement, and availability.  It allows extensibility and portability by allowing new sensors and sensor types to be added without modifying application code. In addition,  TIPPERS supports efficient data management, as well as, built-in mechanisms to ensure users' privacy.

TIPPERS has been deployed at the UCI campus over the past three year to support a suite of smart applications and services that are in daily use including monitoring of spaces inside over 30 campus buildings for occupancy and contact tracing during the pandemic. It has been transitioned to  Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) where it was felicitated  with the Naval Information Warfare Innovations Award n 2021. NIWC researchers used TIPPERs during the Navy's Trident Warrior 2019 and the 2020 exercises to create situational awareness applications aboard a ship. As part of the NSF funded project, TIPPERS is currently being used to build situational awareness during emergency evacuations in elderly living facilities through a project entitled CAREDEX and is being transitioned to other university campuses to support location-aware services.

The TIPPERS testbed is an ongoing collaboration between the ISG group at UCI and campus level Office of Information Technology (OIT) who share network data with the research team in real-time.  

Faculty

Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian

Project Members

 Ashwin Colaco, Nada Lahjouji, Pratyoy Das

Sample Publications

Privacy Cognizant IoT Environment for the Brandeis Program, University of California, Irvine, Final Technical Report,  Report

TIPPERS Evaluation of SSC Pacific  Report .

Transitioning from Testbeds to Ships: An experience Study in Deploying the TIPPERS Internet of Things Platform to the US Navy,  

Dave Archer, Michael A August, Georgios Bouloukakis, Christopher Davison, Mamadou H Diallo, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Christopher T Graves, Michael Hay, Xi He, Peeter Laud, Steve Lu, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Sharad Mehrotra, Gerome Miklau, Alisa Pankova, Shantanu Sharma, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Guoxi Wang, and Roberto Yus  The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation Volume 19, Issue 3 PDF

LOCATER: Cleaning WiFi Connectivity Datasets for Semantic Localization

Yiming Lin, Daokun Jiang, Roberto Yus, Georgios Bouloukakis, Andrew Chio, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 14(3): 329 - 341, 2021 PDF    Slides

Sentaur: Sensor Observable Data Model for Smart Spaces 

Peeyush Gupta, Sharad Mehrotra, Shantanu Sharma, Roberto Yus, Nalini Venkatasubramanian ACM CIKM 2022

The SemIoTic Ecosystem: A Semantic Bridge between IoT Devices and Smart Spaces

Roberto Yus, Georgios Bouloukakis, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian IACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) PDF  

T-Cove: An exposure tracing System based on Cleaning Wi-Fi Events on Organizational Premises 

Yiming Lin, Pramod Khargonekar, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 14(12): 2783 - 2786, 2021. PDF        Poster     Video      

JENNER: Just-in-time Enrichment in Query Processing 

Dhrubajyoti Ghosh Peeyush Gupta, Sharad Mehrotra, Roberto Yus, Yasser Altowim Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2022

MIDE: Accuracy Aware Minimally Invasive Data Exploration For Decision Support 

Sameera Ghayyur, Dhrubjyothi Ghosh, Xi He, Sharad Mehrotra Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2022

Don't Be a Tattle-Tale: Preventing Leakages through Data Dependencies on Access Control Protected Data.

 Primal Pappachan, Shufan Zhang, Xi He, Sharad Mehrotra Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 15 (11) 2022  PDF   

PANDA: Partitioned Data Security on Outsourced Sensitive and Non-sensitive Data. 

Sharad Mehrotra, Shantanu Sharma, Jeffrey D. Ullman, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Peeyush Gupta ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (ACM TMIS), Volume 11, Issue 4, 2020  PDF    Slides

Designing Privacy Preserving Data Sharing Middleware for Internet of Things

Sameera Ghayyur, Primal Pappachan, Guoxi Wang, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, The 3rd International SenSys+BuildSys Workshop on Data: Acquisition to Analysis (DATA '20),  PDF   

Past Members:  Roberto Yus (UMBC) , Shantanu Sharma (NJIT), Peeyush Gupta (Couchbase) , Dhrubjyothi Ghosh (Amazon), Guozi Wang (Meta),  Yiming Lin (UC Berkeley),  Sameera Ghayyur (snapchat), Primal Pappachan (PSU)

Past Collaborators: Mamadou Diallo (NIWC), Norman Sadeh (CMU), Ashwin Machanavajjhala(Duke), Gerome Miklau (Amherst), Michael Hay (Colgate), Xi He (Waterloo)

Sample TIPPERS Application Deployed at UCI

Other Deployments

It has been deployed at other universities including Ball State University(BSU) and Plaksha University. .TIPPERS has been transitioned to the Navy, installed aboard aircraft carriers to support smart space applications such as “man overboard” and “policy-based access to spaces and devices” as part of the Trident Warriors exercise. TIPPERS technology was awarded the 2021 NAVWAR innovations award. It has also been used as an underlying technology to monitor elderly living facilities to support evacuation and traiging in emergency situations and in smart surveillance of dire sites.

Highlights & Press Coverage

TIPPERS Testbed has been covered in popular media especially in its use during the COVID19 Pandemic.