Aging is a recognized global societal issue. It is expected that between now and 2050, every Nation in the world will see a substantial increase in their number of citizens older than 60. Furthermore, there will be more than a dozen super-aged societies in 2020, where more than one in five of the population is 65 years or older. The U.S. and Japan, specifically, are experiencing dramatic population aging and share several similarities. This planning grant will bring together experts bridging disciplines and countries to explore research and development of effective strategies to address healthy aging. Specifically, to achieve the ambitious goals of NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities and Japan’s Society 5.0 and Sustainable Development initiatives and to meet the growing societal expectations, there is a need to realize trustworthy, reliable, safe, secure, and effective smart and connected technologies to empower older adults in all aspects of life. Despite ongoing efforts, there remains a significant digital gap in adoption and user acceptability of assistive technologies among older adult communities. Furthermore, cross-cultural and socio-economic factors play a significant role in achieving scalability.
This JST:SCC-PG proposal assembled a convergent, multi-disciplinary team of researchers from four institutions across two Nations, UMBC and Northeastern University from the U.S. and Kyushu University and Keio University from Japan. The research expertise within the team covers relevant disciplines including gerontology, sociology, health sciences, decision science for sustainable society, information systems, cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, robotics, and computer science. Built upon international consensus, the team will realize innovation far more effectively than any single-nation research team. The team collectively has comprehensive expertise in not just the research areas, but has facilities, best practices, cyber-infrastructure (e.g., cloud-computing and big data servers), and hardware and software design expertise. This JST: S&CC-PG will focus on team-building, user-centered design ideation, and community participation activities to develop a tight and sustainable collaboration among U.S. and Japan researchers to realize new digital solutions based on Internet of Things, Information and Communication Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Trust Services, Security, and Assistive robotics in support of super-aging societies and to educate a new cadre of scientists, engineers, technologists, and entrepreneurs cognizant of global societal challenges. The goal of this Planning Grant is to develop an Integrative Research Grant proposal to NSF and JST, applying these key technologies to create Smart and Connected Communities that address the key challenges of super-aging societies.
Abstract
Anupam Joshi
Anupam Joshi has been a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for more than a decade, teaching courses in Mobile Computing, Security, Social Media, and Operating Systems at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
He is a principal faculty member in UMBC’s Ebiquity Research Group, a cohort of CSEE faculty and students who explore the interactions between mobile and social computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and security, privacy, trust and services. His own research interests deal with Intelligent Networked Systems, with a focus on Mobile Computing. Dr. Joshi’s research has explored security, trust and privacy from a declarative, policy driven and semantically rich approach. An example of such work is a recent grant from NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a three year project to investigate how to better manage security and privacy constraints while querying semantically annotated linked data sources. The project, Policy Compliant Integration of Linked Data, is a collaboration with researchers at M.I.T. and the University of Texas at Dallas. He is also exploring how to detect and respond to attacks by using semantically rich approaches to reasoning over sensed security data streams, and exploring security and privacy issues in mobile computing, social media, and healthcare.
In his almost 20 years in academia, Dr. Joshi has published over 175 technical papers, and obtained research support from a variety of federal (NSF, NIST, DARPA, DoD, …) and industrial (IBM, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Qualcomm, Lockheed Martin, …) sources. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University, and a B. Tech in EE from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Performance Period: 05/15/2020 - 04/30/2022
Institution: University of Maryland Baltimore County
Award Number: 1952032
Core Areas:
International
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