Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Welcome Remarks to Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group (CPS PWG) Face-to-Face Meeting

Good Morning everyone!

I'm very pleased to welcome you to NIST, and to the second face-to-face meeting of the full Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group.

I am delighted to see so many folks here bright and early on a Tuesday morning. And I know that you're all eager to get started. We have a great group of cyber-physical system experts here, including representatives from industry, academia, and government.

In addition, I want to welcome our virtual participants online who are listening in to our plenary sessions via our webcast – welcome, everyone.

Together, you represent a remarkable group assembled to contribute your wisdom, experience, and creativity to help develop the foundation and framework for future cyber-physical systems.

I had the pleasure of welcoming you at our kickoff CPS PWG face-to-face meeting back in August 2014, and I am happy to see that significant progress has occurred since then, including work to develop a draft CPS Framework and reference architectural concepts that we will hear more about in this morning's presentations.

To get things started, let me say a few words about NIST's mission and the role of the Engineering Laboratory, and then you will also hear from Chris Greer, director of the Smart Grid and Cyber Physical Systems Program Office, and Dave Wollman, Chris's deputy. 

NIST is a measurement science institution with a mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.

In the Engineering Laboratory, one of seven NIST laboratories, we contribute to the overall NIST mission by anticipating and meeting the measurement science and standards needs for advancing standards and technology in areas such as manufacturing, firefighting, smart buildings, disaster resilience, and cyber-physical systems. To achieve these goals, we need active collaboration with our partners in industry, academia, and government—and that's why we're very glad to have all of you here today.

As an example of this active collaboration, we have been working closely with disaster resilience stakeholders through a series of regional workshops across the United States, as we bring experts together to collaborate and develop a community-based Disaster Resilience Framework—another example of working together to create an important framework like we are doing here with Cyber-Physical Systems. 

As you all know very well, Cyber-Physical Systems include smart devices in multiple domains in which cyber and physical elements are co-engineered and networked to enable new functions, including interacting with intelligent infrastructures.

With your help and contributions, the Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group and its subgroups successfully developed initial Framework Element reports back in December. This input was initially combined into a rough Draft CPS Framework, and then, with additional work by the reference architecture team and the CPS PWG co-chairs leadership team, the document has now been reordered and improved with the identification of "Facets" and "Aspects" which you will hear about in great detail throughout the morning.

In addition to engaging with experts such as you in the CPS public working group, we have additional CPS programs at NIST, including efforts in my laboratory to bring together smart cities stakeholders and to build up NIST's CPS research capabilities.

We have been partnering with cities, industry, and innovators in our Global Cities teams challenge, which we launched this fall as a follow-on to our successful Smart America Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to create teams of cities and innovators working together on issues like air quality, resource management, health care delivery, and modern energy grids to utilize the best available technology to build "smart cities."

Over 40 teams are working together to develop and deploy cutting-edge CPS and Internet of Things applications with city-scale implementations, and we are planning a festival in early June to showcase these efforts; please save the date—June 1, 2015, in Washington D.C. 

In addition, we are designing and developing a new CPS test bed, to be co-located with our new Smart Grid test bed now under construction, in order to support future CPS research. It is very early in the development of this CPS test bed, but as part of our preparation, we have already hosted a recent workshop at NIST to foster collaboration with stakeholders to identify best practices and designs, and, even further, to help organize a multisector CPS test bed community. 

Again, I am happy to welcome you to NIST for our Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group face-to-face meeting, and I am looking forward to the presentations this morning.

Later today, you will all have the opportunity to test drive the draft framework and its concepts in breakout sessions that will be focused on a different CPS scenarios. 

So, let's keep things rolling here. Now I'd like to introduce Chris Greer, director of the Smart Grid and Cyber Physical Systems Program Office, to provide his opening remarks to kick off today's activities.

Created May 13, 2015, Updated December 29, 2016