Roberto Yus receives NSF CAREER award!

Roberto Yus has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for Towards a Sensorless Internet of Things through Sensor Data Management Abstraction. The five-year award (NSF #2542782, $599,184, July 2026 – June 2031) is funded by NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.

Although IoT deployments collect enormous amounts of sensor data, making use of it still requires knowing which sensors to query, which machine learning models to run, and how to stitch the results together — expertise most organizations do not have. This project introduces a semantic abstraction layer that hides that complexity, so users can ask directly for high-level concepts such as occupancy or energy consumption and let the system work out which sensors, models, and data pipelines are needed to answer them.

The research is organized around three thrusts: formal modeling and optimization of queries over abstracted sensor data, self-driving abstraction planning across heterogeneous databases, and extending the approach to federated settings with privacy constraints. The work will be validated on real deployments, including UMBC’s smart campus, manufacturing testbeds, and smart home laboratories.

The award also supports education and outreach, including new university course material, high school internships, and summer programs for Baltimore-area students.

Read more in the UMBC CSEE announcement and the NSF award page.