Statement of Purpose Santosh G Vattam MS

Statement of purpose Santosh G Vattam MS, Embedded Systems (CIS), May 2012 Research Interest I am a Master of Science and Engineering student majoring in Embedded Systems from University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 2012. I am interested in embedded systems modeling and model based code generation. This interest has developed thanks to my research project with Prof. Insup Lee as well as the Embedded and Cyber Physical Systems and the Principles of Embedded Computation courses I took at Penn with Prof. Insup Lee and Prof. Rajeev Alur respectively.

The Embedded and CPS course involved modeling and implementation of a pacemaker, while the Principles of Embedded Computation course provided the much needed theoritical foundation for developing embedded system models and verifying and validating thus developed models. Research projects In Jan 2011, I started working on the Medical Device Dongle(MDD) Project with Prof. Insup Lee. The idea was to make patient monitoring, patient centric rather than device centric by developing a standards-based interface for medical device interoperability.

We decided to use the existing device interoperability standard – IEEE11073-PHD with slight modications. I implemented the rst prototype of the IEEE11073 Manager and Agent state machines. We later encountered the problem of providing a medium for using the services of the MDD and thus we designed and implemented an interface to sit on top of the MDD. We have since presented our work at the Wireless Health Conference 2011, San Diego, CA and at Embedded Software Week Android competition, Taipei, Taiwan. We shall also be presenting at the International Health Informatics Symposium, Miami, FL in Jan 2012.

Prior to this, I have worked on the Coverage Analysis of RTEMS(Real Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems) as part of Google Summer of Code 2009 and mentored another student in 2010 for the same project. This project was my rst step into the embedded world. I wrote test cases to validate that every single line of object code generated was executed. I worked on the RTEMS-core codebase and in 2010 I mentored a student to work on the extended codebase. Research focus I would like to focus my research on model based code generation and validating the conformation of code to the model on which it was based.

This is a problem that I have come across while working on the MDD project. We have based our design on the IEEE11073 architecture but there are no open implementations of it through which we can verify our implementation. There are certain validation tools but these just analyze the packet structure of the 11073 packets but not the ow of these packets within the network of devices. I am partly tackling this problem through my Masters thesis by writing test cases to validate the exchange of the right packets. This method, however, does not provide insight into the internal state ow of the code. I would like to study, n depth, the ways of validating code to the state model. I believe that by pursuing a PhD I shall not only gain the necessary skill set to tackle this problem, but also the insight of looking at unstructured data and obtaining structured information from it. Prof Insup Lee and his team at the PRECISE Center work on model based design and validation in the medical device domain. I have been working with Prof. Insup Lee and his team for close to a year now on the MDD project. I believe that the environment and the expertise at the PRECISE Center will provide me with the encouragement and the academic stimulus to excel at my research.