Emerging cyber-physical systems are distributed systems in constant interaction with their physical environments through sensing and actuation at network edges. Over the past decade, the embedded and control systems community have vigorously pursued a vision of coupled feedback-controlled systems with a broad range of real-life applications from transportation, smart buildings to human health. These efforts have continued to push intelligent processing to edge and near-edge devices, provide new capabilities for improved sensing with high quality timing information, establish limits on the quality of time and its impact on the stability of control algorithms etc.

Today large amount of data is generated by cities. Many of the datasets are openly available and are contributed by different sectors, government bodies and institutions. The new data can affect our understanding of the issues faced by cities and can support evidence based policies. However usage of data is limited due to difficulty in assimilating data from different sources. Open datasets often lack uniform structure which limits its analysis using traditional database systems. In this paper we present Citadel, a data hub for cities. Citadel's goal is to support end to end knowledge discovery cyber-infrastructure for effective analysis and policy support. Citadel is designed to ingest large amount of heterogeneous data and supports multiple use cases by encouraging data sharing in cities. Our poster presents the proposed features, architecture, implementation details and initial results.

Thermostats are the primary interface for occupants of office buildings to express their thermal comfort preferences. However, traditional thermostats are often ineffective due to physical inaccessibility, lack of information or limited responsiveness, which lead to occupant discomfort. Modern thermostat designs do overcome some of these limitations, but retrofitting them to existing buildings is prohibitively expensive. Software thermostats based on web or smartphone apps provide an alternate interaction mechanism with minimal deployment cost. However, their usage and effectiveness have not been studied extensively in real settings. We present Genie, a novel software thermostat that we designed and deployed in our university for over 21 months. We compare the use of Genie to traditional thermostats. Our data and user study show that due to the clarity of information and wider thermal control provided by Genie, users feel more comfortable in their offices. Furthermore, the improved comfort did not affect the overall energy consumption or lead to misuse of HVAC controls.