As software plays a significant role in modern systems, once it fails, it often leads to serious injury or death to people, or high economic loss to infrastructures. Guaranteeing correct function of software is essential, but challenging due to its high complexity and a wide range of uncertainty of its operating environment. This research area is to explore formal methods to guarantee correctness of systems and software, and overcome their inherent limitations such as expressiveness, modularity, scalability or support of AI (Artificial Intelligence) components. The specific research topics may include, but not limited to, model-based development, formal verification, provably-correct code generation, test criteria and test generation. 

Assuring safety of autonomous systems, typically equipped with AI, is challenging since the physical environment they are interacting with is very complex and not always controllable. Digital Twin has become a popular trend to analyze complex systems in virtual environments – a replica of the physical environments. This research area is to verify and validate the behavior of autonomous systems, such as vehicles, drones, robots, operating in various scenarios generated from the virtual environment. The specific research topics may include, but not limited to, virtual scenario specification & generation, game engine-based virtual-in-the-loop test design, human factor & mental model analysis. 

Modern IoT (Internet of Things) systems perform their missions often sending, processing or receiving big data. While a number of Quality of Service (QoS) criteria, such as timeliness or service availability, need to be guaranteed, it is challenging since compute resources and data sources are not always physically co-located due to IoT hardware limitations or security/privacy concerns. This research area is to explore methods to guarantee performance criteria for such data-centric IoT applications. The specific research topics may include, but not limited to, distributed computation models, computation/data offloading, workload characterization, resource provisioning, fault-tolerance systems.