In June 2025, Stevens Professor Ying Wang from the Department of Systems Engineering received the prestigious Army Research Office (ARO) Early Career Award for her project titled “From Proactive to Autonomous: Dynamic Assurance in CPS via Formal-Fuzz Interactions and Posterior Formal Verification.” Her research advances the assurance and resilience of critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and as these systems grow more complex and interconnected, “it is essential to develop frameworks capable of providing adaptive and continuous assurance,” said Professor Wang.
Through the ARO Early Career Award with $359,951 of research funding, Professor Wang will continue expanding her research to deepen the theoretical foundation of dynamic assurance.” Her work is aimed at protecting these systems from some of the most unexpected conditions. Her approach involves the use of mathematical proofs and smart testing to create more reliable systems instead of the more traditional verification methods and testing. Some of the tools she uses include formal verification, intelligent fuzz testing, and causality modeling. Formal verification works to ensure a system is built properly through formidable mathematics, intelligent fuzz creates randomized and unexpected circumstances for the system to learn from, and causality modeling predicts the likelihood of certain situations so that systems can best evaluate the most secure decisions for their sustainability. These tools work in a cycle to constantly and consistently improve system resilience.
Professor Ying Wang shared that she feels deeply honored to receive the award and expressed her sincere appreciation to the Army Research Office for both the recognition and their continued support. She also expresses her gratitude for her students and collaborators for all of their hard work and dedication. Looking ahead, Professor Wang plans to further involve her students by building a research platform that enables graduate and undergraduate students to experiment with adaptive verification pipelines for real-world CPS, such as aerial and robotic systems operating in uncertain environments.
Her research is rooted in her Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA) project “5G Causality, Formal Reasoning and Resilience.” She states that this work had motivated her to “go deeper toward provable assurance,” sparking her research interest in autonomous and complex cyber-physical systems. Similarly, she hopes that her work will inspire more students to pursue research at the intersection of “trust, autonomy, and resilience.”
