As cyber-physical systems (CPS) become increasingly a part of our daily life, the need for a well-prepared workforce also becomes evident, calling for new approaches and test-beds to introduce CPS concepts into classrooms at all levels. The literature has many examples of CPS relevant platforms, which are used successfully in research; however, especially the commercial ones are mostly closed-architecture and do not provide an in-depth engagement for the students in all aspects of the hardware and software. This paper introduces a novel platform, known as the AERO-Beam, which conveys many basics of CPS, while also introducing the dynamics and control fundamentals of quadcopters. Quadcopters are widely used in CPS projects, and yet they are either closed-architecture or too complex for use in CPS education. The AERO-Beam addresses the need in many ways, as demonstrated through the multi-level classroom implementation.

Abstract Digital objects or entities present us with particular problems of an acute nature. The most acute of these are the issues surrounding what constitutes identity within the digital world and between digital entities. These are problems that are important in many contexts but, when dealing with digital texts, documents, and certification, an understanding of them becomes vital legally, philosophically, and historically. Legally, the central issues are those of authorship, authenticity, and ownership; philosophically, we must be concerned with the sorts of logical relations that hold between objects and in determining the ontological nature of the object; and historically, our concern centers around our interest in chronology and the recording of progress, adaptation, change, and provenance. Our purpose is to emphasize why questions of digital identity matter and how we might address and respond to some of them. We will begin by examining the lines along which we draw a distinction between the digital and the physical context and how, by importing notions of transitivity and symmetry from the domain of mathematical logic, we might attempt to provide at least interim resolutions of these questions.