Welcome to the Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems Lab!

(Update: Starting October 1st, 2019, the Resilient CPS lab will be reallocated to the University of California, Irvine! You can visit our new website here!)


The Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems lab is part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland. We are physically located in 2352 AV Williams Building with an additional testing facility located in the Energy Research Building.

Our research is in the broad area of embedded and cyber-physical systems with applications in robotics, IoT, and pervasive sensing and control. We design algorithms and build systems to enable CPS to be resilient, secure, and privacy-preserving. Our research is at the intersection of theory and systems and draws on tools from embedded systems, formal methods, control theory, and machine learning and is motivated by real-world applications. You can read more about our research here, you can follow us on twitter and instagram, and you can see videos of our research on our youtube channel.


We are currently looking for Ph.D. students and postdocs with interests and expertise in machine learning, formal methods, control theory, and cyber-physical systems. Female students and students from underrepresented groups are highly encouraged to apply!

Interested in joining? We are always looking for bright and motivated talents. Please read below for more information on how to join our lab.

Recent News

  • July 2019: Prof. Shoukry receives the George Corcoran Memorial Award presented to young faculty who "has shown exemplary contributions to teaching and educational leadership".
  • June 2019: Prof. Shoukry will give a talk at the 2nd Workshop on Formal Methods for ML-Enabled Autonomous Systems (affiliated with CAV 2019).
  • June 2019: Our work on applying formal verification for end-to-end learning was featured in a blog post in the "ACM Programming Languages Perspectives" blog.
  • May 2019: Dr. James Ferlez will join RCPSL as a postdoc researcher starting summer 2019.
  • Feb. 2019: Prof. Shoukry receives the prestigious NSF CAREER Award!
  • Feb. 2019: New project on "Security and Networking Co-Design for Industrial IoT" supported by Northrop Grumman.
  • Feb. 2019: Prof. Shoukry will give a colloquium talk on "Resilient and Verifiable Autonomous CPS" at University of Virginia.
  • Feb. 2019: Our paper on the privacy of Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) IoT has been accepted in SafeThings workshop (co-located with IEEE S&P).
  • Jan. 2019: Our paper on DoS motion planning is accepted for publication in ICRA 2019.
  • Dec. 2018: Our paper on the formal verification of neural network based reinforcement learning controllers is accepted for publication in HSCC 2019.
  • ... (read more)

Recent Publications:

  • Xiaowu Sun, Haitham Khder, and Yasser Shoukry, "Formal Verification of Neural Network Controlled Autonomous Systems," Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC) 2019, to appear (arXiv 2018).
  • Xiaowu Sun, Rohitkrishna Nambiar, Matthew Melhorn, Yasser Shoukry, and Pierluigi Nuzzo, "DoS-Resilient Multi-Robot Temporal Logic Motion Planning," 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), to appear.
  • Houssam Abbas, Indranil Saha, Yasser Shoukry, Rüdiger Ehlers, Georgios Fainekos, Rajesh Gupta, Rupak Majumdar, and Dogan Ulus, "Embedded Software for Robotics: Challenges and Future Directions," The ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), 2018.
  • Yasser Shoukry, Shaunak Mishra, Zutian Luo, and Suhas Diggavi, "Sybil Attack Resilient Traffic Networks: A Physics-Based Trust Propagation Approach," ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2018.
  • Yasser Shoukry, Pierluigi Nuzzo, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Sanjit A. Seshia, George J. Pappas, and Paulo Tabuada, "SMC:Satisfiability Modulo Convex Programming," Proceedings of the IEEE, 2018.
  • Andreea B. Alexandru, Konstantinos Gatsis, Yasser Shoukry, Sanjit A. Seshia, Paulo Tabuada, and George J. Pappas, "Cloud-based Quadratic Optimization with Partially Homomorphic Encryption", arXiv, 2018.

Funded Projects:

Security and Networking Co-Design for Industrial IoT

(Role: PI, collaborators: Prof. Nuno C. Martins at UMD)

Completed Projects:

Attack Resilient Law Enforcement Drones

(Role: PI, collaborators: Prof. P. S. Krishnaprasad at UMD)

Software/Hardware Support:

We are very grateful to the generous support given by the following companies: