Assistant professor Zhishan Guo was one of five UCF faculty honored with UCF’s Reach for the Stars award.
The honor recognizes early-career professionals with highly successful research and creative activity with a national or international impact. It is second only to the Pegasus Professor Award, UCF’s highest faculty honor. Together this year’s honorees have secured about $10 million in funded sponsored research from a variety of organizations and have contributed more than 300 publications.
Guo’s research centers on artificial intelligence and real-time and embedded systems.
More and more physical environments are now embedded with computing and communication capabilities, as computing, electronics, and sensing technologies have become smaller, more affordable and more efficient.
These environments can range from air-traffic control systems, autonomous driving, and smart communities to anti-lock brakes and pacemakers.
If these systems don’t operate correctly, including performing their operations in the right order in real time, the consequences could be catastrophic, including the loss of human life.
“Seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components, or cyber-physical systems, is shaping the way humans interact with the physical world,” says Guo, who leads research into real-time scheduling and machine learning theory into applications of various cyber-physical systems.
“My research mainly focuses on ensuring temporal correctness of cyber-physical systems is guaranteed in the era of artificial intelligence and the internet of things,” Guo says. “How can we balance resource efficiency, AI trustworthiness, and quality control, and can subsystems autonomously coordinate and compute in real-time while scaling well?”
Guo says he enjoys his research, and he chose to work at UCF because it is a major research institute in the Orlando metropolitan area and that “it is young, alive, and full of opportunities.” He started at UCF in 2018.
He says he is proud of helping UCF rank 11th nationally by Csrankings for its research in embedded and real time-systems, as well as his best paper awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Real-Time Systems Symposium and the International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems recently, which are flagship conferences in real-time systems and embedded systems domains.
“I want to thank the wonderful leadership at the university, college, and department levels, and for the continuous support by my colleagues and collaborators, including my students,” Guo says.
Adapted from the UCF Today story by Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala and Robert Wells