Helen Gill coined the term 'cyber-physical systems' around 2006 at the National Science Foundation

Edward A. Lee — a Berkeley professor and one of the field's principal builders — states in a peer-reviewed 2015 retrospective on cyber-physical systems (CPS): "The term 'cyber-physical systems' emerged around 2006, when it was coined by Helen Gill at the National Science Foundation in the United States." Gill directed the relevant NSF program area; a corroborating (Tier 3, non-load-bearing) tech-history account situates the coinage at an October 2006 NSF Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Austin, Texas, though that workshop framing was not independently verified against NSF's own records this session.

This is an uncontested naming-and-priority claim, not a mechanism claim, and a Tier 1 named-author source is more than sufficient to clear the sourcing floor for it (§ sources.md: historical/biographical claims need only Tier 3–4 when uncontested).

The coinage matters to the vault because CPS names a distinct research tradition — computation embedded in feedback with physical processes — with its own claimed relationship to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics; see claim-cyber-physical-systems-cybernetics-common-root-not-derivation for what the literature actually says about that relationship, and claim-bit2watt-gpu-scheduling-destabilizes-power-grid for a modern instance of the CPS framing (an attack that "operates entirely within the cyber layer" against a physical power grid).