Jane Cleland-Huang

• PhD from University of Illinois at Chicago
• Developer at DePaul University

The increasing deployment of small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) in diverse and often safety-critical environments demands rigorous validation of onboard decision logic under various conditions. In this paper, we present SaFUZZ, a state-aware fuzzing pipeline that validates core behavior associated with state transitions, automated failsafes, and...

Cyber-physical systems increasingly rely on Foundational Models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to increase autonomy through enhanced perception, inference, and planning. However, these models also introduce new types of errors, such as hallucinations, overgeneralizations, and context misalignments, resulting...

This paper proposes a goal oriented approach to safeguard identification, prioritization, and selection in order to mitigate security risks. The goal-oriented approach has many benefits over other techniques such as the common framework, valuation based methods, scenario and misuse case approaches, and decision analysis methods. Goal-Oriented techn...

With the increasing deployment of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) in unfamiliar and complex environments, Environmental Digital Twins (EDT) that comprise weather, airspace, and terrain data are critical for safe flight planning and for maintaining appropriate altitudes during search and surveillance operations. With the expansion of sUAS cap...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become vital in search-and-rescue (SAR) missions, with autonomous mission planning improving response times and coverage efficiency. Early approaches primarily used path planning techniques such as A*, potential-fields, or Dijkstra's algorithm, while recent approaches have incorporated meta-heuristic frameworks...

Industrial catastrophes like the Bhopal disaster (1984) and the Aliso Canyon gas leak (2015) demonstrate the urgent need for rapid and reliable plume tracing algorithms to protect public health and the environment. Traditional methods, such as gradient-based or biologically inspired approaches, often fail in realistic, turbulent conditions. To addr...

Complex systems, such as small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) swarms dispatched for emergency response, often require dynamic reconfiguration at runtime under the supervision of human operators. This introduces human-on-the-loop requirements, where evolving needs shape ongoing system functionality and behaviors. While traditional personas support u...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore propose the SAFE-RL (Safety and Accountability Framework for Evaluating Reinforcement Learning) for supporting...

Traceability, the ability to trace relevant software artifacts to support reasoning about the quality of the software and its development process, plays a crucial role in requirements and software engineering, particularly for safety-critical systems. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of the representative tasks in requirement tr...

As small Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (sUAS) increasingly operate in the national airspace, safety concerns arise due to a corresponding rise in reported airspace violations and incidents, highlighting the need for a safe mechanism for sUAS entry control to manage the potential overload. This paper presents work toward our aim of establishing automate...

Small uncrewed aerial systems, sUAS, provide an invaluable resource for performing a variety of surveillance, search, and delivery tasks in remote or hostile terrains which may not be accessible by other means. Due to the critical role sUAS play in these situations, it is vital that they are well configured in order to ensure a safe and stable flig...

The success of Emergency Response (ER) scenarios, such as search and rescue, is often dependent upon the prompt location of a lost or injured person. With the increasing use of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) as "eyes in the sky" during ER scenarios, efficient detection of persons from aerial views plays a crucial role in achieving a successfu...

Software engineering practices such as constructing requirements and establishing traceability help ensure systems are safe, reliable, and maintainable. However, they can be resource-intensive and are frequently underutilized. To alleviate the burden of these essential processes, we developed the Requirements Organization and Optimization Tool (ROO...

Software documentation supports a broad set of software maintenance tasks; however, creating and maintaining high-quality, multi-level software documentation can be incredibly time-consuming and therefore many code bases suffer from a lack of adequate documentation. We address this problem through presenting HGEN, a fully automated pipeline that le...

Traceability, the ability to trace relevant software artifacts to support reasoning about the quality of the software and its development process, plays a crucial role in requirements and software engineering, particularly for safety-critical systems. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of the representative tasks in requirement tr...

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) have gained widespread adoption across a diverse range of applications. This has introduced operational complexities within shared airspaces and an increase in reported incidents, raising safety concerns. In response, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) s...

The Human Machine Teaming (HMT) paradigm focuses on supporting partnerships between humans and autonomous machines. HMT describes requirements for transparency, augmented cognition, and coordination that enable far richer partnerships than those found in typical human-on-the-loop and human-in-the-loop systems. Autonomous, self-adaptive systems in d...

Abstract—Software systems are increasingly expected to ad- dress a broad range of stakeholder values representing both personal and societal values as well as values ensconced as laws and regulations. Whereas laws and regulations must be fully addressed, other human values need to be carefully analyzed and prioritized within the context of candidat...

Abstract—Recent work has recognized the importance of developing and deploying software systems that reflect human values and has explored different approaches for eliciting these values from stakeholders. However, prior studies have also shown that it can be challenging for stakeholders to specify a diverse set of product-related human values. In...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize automated traceability by overcoming the challenges faced by previous methods and introducing new possibilities. However, the optimal utilization of LLMs for automated traceability remains unclear. This paper explores the process of prompt engineering to extract link predictions from...

Safety-critical system's failure or malfunction can cause loss of human lives or damage to the physical environment; therefore, continuous safety assessment is crucial for such systems. In many domains this includes the use of Safety assurance cases (SACs) as a structured argument that the system is safe for use. SACs can be challenging to maintain...

Flight-time failures of small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) can have a severe impact on people or the environment. Therefore, sUAS applications must be thoroughly evaluated and tested to ensure their adherence to specified requirements, and safe behavior under real-world conditions, such as poor weather, wireless interference, and satellite failur...

Software traceability is the process of establishing and maintaining relationships between artifacts in a software system. This process is crucial to many engineering processes, particularly for safety critical projects; however, it is labor-intensive and error-prone. Automated traceability has been a long awaited tool for project managers of these...

Computer Vision (CV) is used in a broad range of Cyber-Physical Systems such as surgical and factory floor robots and autonomous vehicles including small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS). It enables machines to perceive the world by detecting and classifying objects of interest, reconstructing 3D scenes, estimating motion, and maneuvering around obje...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">With the increasing deployment of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) on various tasks, it becomes crucial to analyze and detect anomalies from their flight logs. To support research in this area, we curate DLA, the first real-world time series anomaly...

In emergency response scenarios, autonomous small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) must be configured and deployed quickly and safely to perform mission-specific tasks. In this paper, we present Drone Response, a Software Product Line for rapidly configuring and deploying a multi-role, multi-sUAS mission whilst guaranteeing a set of safety properties...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are increasingly used in safety-critical scenarios where ensuring their correct behavior at runtime becomes a crucial task. Therefore, the behavior of the CPS needs to be monitored at runtime so that violations of requirements can be detected. With the inception of edge devices that facilitate runtime analysis at the ed...

CyberPhysical systems (CPS) must be closely monitored to identify and potentially mitigate emergent problems that arise during their routine operations. However, the multivariate time-series data which they typically produce can be complex to understand and analyze. While formal product documentation often provides example data plots with diagnosti...

Software requirements traceability is a critical component of the software engineering process, enabling activities such as requirements validation, compliance verification, and safety assurance. However, the cost and effort of manually creating a complete set of trace links across natural language artifacts such as requirements, design, and test-c...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-3540.vid The rapid growth in the number of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) and the related increase in reported airspace violations and incidents, makes it imperative to improve sUAS safety. In this paper, we describe our vision and preliminary results for deploying data analytic solution...

Recent breakthroughs in deep-learning (DL) approaches have resulted in the dynamic generation of trace links that are far more accurate than was previously possible. However, DL-generated links lack clear explanations, and therefore non-experts in the domain can find it difficult to understand the underlying semantics of the link, making it hard fo...

The MAPE-K feedback loop has been established as the primary reference model for self-adaptive and autonomous systems in domains such as autonomous driving, robotics, and Cyber-Physical Systems. At the same time, the Human Machine Teaming (HMT) paradigm is designed to promote partnerships between humans and autonomous machines. It goes far beyond t...

Software traceability links are established between diverse artifacts of the software development process in order to support tasks such as compliance analysis, safety assurance, and requirements validation. However, practice has shown that it is difficult and costly to create and maintain trace links in non-trivially sized projects. For this reaso...

Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence have shifted the focus from traditional human-directed robots to fully autonomous ones that do not require explicit human control. These are commonly referred to as Human-on-the-Loop (HotL) systems. Transparency of HotL systems necessitates clear explanations of autonomous behavior so that humans are aw...

Emergency response events are fast-paced, noisy, and they require teamwork to accomplish the mission. Furthermore, the increasing deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) alongside emergency responders, demands a new form of partnership between humans and UAVs. Traditional radio-based information exchange between humans during an emergency res...

Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence have shifted the focus from traditional human-directed robots to fully autonomous ones that do not require explicit human control. These are commonly referred to as Human-on-the-Loop (HotL) systems. Transparency of HotL systems necessitates clear explanations of autonomous behavior so that humans are aw...

Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence have shifted the focus from traditional human-directed robots to fully autonomous ones that do not require explicit human control. These are commonly referred to as Human-on-the-Loop (HotL) systems. Transparency of HotL systems necessitates clear explanations of autonomous behavior so that humans are aw...

Automatic construction of a taxonomy supports many applications in e-commerce, web search, and question answering. Existing taxonomy expansion or completion methods assume that new concepts have been accurately extracted and their embedding vectors learned from the text corpus. However, one critical and fundamental challenge in fixing the incomplet...

Computer vision approaches are widely used by autonomous robotic systems to sense the world around them and to guide their decision making as they perform diverse tasks such as collision avoidance, search and rescue, and object manipulation. High accuracy is critical, particularly for Human-on-the-loop (HoTL) systems where decisions are made autono...

Software traceability establishes and leverages associations between diverse development artifacts. Researchers have proposed the use of deep learning trace models to link natural language artifacts, such as requirements and issue descriptions, to source code; however, their effectiveness has been restricted by availability of labeled data and effi...

Research in human-drone interactions has primarily focused on cases in which a person interacts with a single drone as an active controller, recipient of information, or a social companion; or cases in which an individual, or a team of operators interacts with a swarm of drones as they perform some coordinated flight patterns. In this position pape...

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search-and-rescue, has the potential for huge societal benefits. Onboard sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) allow these UAVs to operate autonomously in the environment. However, human intelligence and dom...

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search-and-rescue, has the potential for huge societal benefits. Onboard sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) allow these UAVs to operate autonomously in the environment. However, human intelligence and dom...

Software traceability establishes associations between diverse software artifacts such as requirements, design, code, and test cases. Due to the non-trivial costs of manually creating and maintaining links, many researchers have proposed automated approaches based on information retrieval techniques. However, many globally distributed software proj...

Safety-critical software systems must be developed using rigorous safety assurance practices. This has led to the phenomenon referred to as the “big freeze” in which the cost, effort, and difficulty of introducing new functionality to an already certified product is prohibitively expensive. However, present day agile processes have greatly matured...

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search and rescue, offers the potential for huge societal benefits. However, designing an effective solution in this complex domain represents a "wicked design" problem, requiring a careful balance between trade-offs asso...

The growing adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for tasks such as eCommerce, aerial surveillance, and environmental monitoring introduces the need for new safety mechanisms in an increasingly cluttered airspace. In our work we thus emphasize safety issues that emerge at the intersection of infrastructures responsible for controlling the airs...