Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. received a $600,000 Project Grant award dated August 1, 2026, from the National Science Foundation's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070). The project, which extends through July 31, 2029, will develop and operate a publicly accessible, annotated security dataset for manufacturing cyberinfrastructure. The deliverables include a hybrid cyber-physical testbed integrating a fully instrumented assembly facility at the University of Georgia Innovation Factory with a high-fidelity digital twin simulator. The platform will generate time-synchronized, multimodal security traces encompassing network logs, physical process data such as torque curves and vibration signatures, and de-identified operator metadata collected under benign, fault, and adversarial conditions.

The project will release datasets publicly through NSF-aligned repositories under open-source licensing and provide defensible benchmarks for manufacturing security research and artificial intelligence-driven smart manufacturing innovation. Key deliverables include a hybrid generation environment utilizing digital twin technology for deterministic replay and safe exploration of rare or safety-constrained events; a three-dimensional attack surface characterization spanning cyber, physical, and human layers; and integrity-verified data lineage pipelines ensuring dataset authenticity and reproducibility. Through these products and services, the initiative aims to strengthen the manufacturing cybersecurity research community and the workforce pipeline by providing open-access resources that accelerate the transition from academic innovation to deployable security solutions in an economically critical sector.