Yu Yang, PhD

Dr. Yu Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University. He is broadly interested in Mobile Sensing, Ubiquitous Computing, Data Science, and Cyber-Physical Systems. His current research is focused on sensing, prediction, and decision making for cross-domain mobile systems including taxis, buses, trucks, bikes, mobile payment, and cellular networks with applications for Smart Cities and Gig Economy.

ABSTRACT

Cyber Physical Systems for On-demand Delivery

In this talk, Dr. Yang will introduce our group’s work on the foundations and applications of Human Cyber Physical Systems with a concrete use case of on-demand delivery as part of the Gig Economy. The key challenge for on-demand delivery is to obtain real-time gig worker status in a cost-efficient approach to enable timely delivery and efficient order scheduling. However, the existing sensing approaches in both industry and academy has limited scalability due to cost issues. Based on our collaboration with Alibaba On-demand Delivery Platform, he will introduce a nationwide sensing system called aBeacon exploring a hybrid solution of hardware, software, and human participation. aBeacon detects and infers the status of more than 3 million workers in 364 cities in China via a sophisticated tradeoff between performance, cost, and privacy. He will provide some lessons learned and insights when aBeacon evolves from the conception to design, deployment, validation, and operation. Finally, he will discuss a few new challenges and open problems in Cyber Physical Systems.