Saurabh's Home Page

New Stuff

1. [October 31, 2009] I am participating in the NSF NEES project as a Purdue co-PI. This is the largest grant ever won at Purdue. The National Science Foundation created the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) to improve our understanding of earthquakes and their effects. NEES is a shared national network of 14 experimental facilities, collaborative tools, a centralized data repository, and earthquake simulation software. Together, these resources provide the means for collaboration and discovery in the form of more advanced research based on experimentation and computational simulations of the ways buildings, bridges, utility systems, coastal regions, and geomaterials perform during seismic events.

Purdue will be running the operations of NEES for 2009-2014. My role in this is the cybersecurity officer responsible for the security of NEES assets at NEEScomm (the headquarters, here at Purdue) as well as at the 14 sites through the US. You can find the press release upon the announcement of the NEES award and the announcement of the NEES team at the following URLs:

http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2009b/090910RamirezNEES.html

"https://www.nees.org/about/neescomm/team/

2. [August 11, 2009] We are looking for two PhD students to join our lab as Research Assistants. [html]

· [Oct 1, 09] These positions have been filled.

3. [July 2, 2009] I have been selected to be the Program Committee Chair for DSN, our premier conference, for its 2011 edition, which will be held in Hong Kong.

4. [July 2009] Our papers have been accepted in Sensys, Supercomputing (nominated as a candidate for best student paper), Middleware, and MASS. Hey, this feels pretty good for all of us here.

Research Interests

My research interests are in the areas of large-scale distributed systems, reliable and secure systems, and computer networks and protocols, including ad-hoc and sensor networks.

I am interested in the question of how to build heterogeneous large-scale distributed systems that are reliable. Since many business and life critical functions are being performed by distributed systems, they need to be reliable while meeting their performance goals. Thus, there is need for smart error detection, diagnosis and recovery protocols. More importantly, there is need for architectures that can combine fault tolerance aspects with performance aspects in an adaptive manner, adapting to different user requirements and different runtime environments. I consider intrusions to be an increasingly important class of faults and am therefore looking at the design of intrusion tolerant systems. For a concrete application context for my work, I am considering dynamic mobile environments, such as ad-hoc wireless networks.

Wireless networks of sensor nodes cooperating among themselves for information gathering and analysis are becoming an important platform in several domains, including military warfare, space exploration and weather monitoring. Sensor networks are composed of sensor nodes placed in an infrastructure-less environment communicating with each other using low bandwidth communication links. The nodes are placed in the environment to be monitored in situ and have the capacity for sensing, communication, computation and sometimes, mobility. Since the nodes have limited power resource, all the tasks need to be performed under power constraints. In my research, I am investigating the issues in building sensor networks to meet high-level application requirements in the face of constraints on power and reliability of the sensor nodes.

For details of my research projects, take a look at the home page of the Dependable Computing Systems Research Group. If you are interested in working in the research group, please take a look at the process for this outlined here. I have explained the kinds of conferences and journals where I publish my research here. My CV is here .

Dependable Computing Systems Research Group
Publications
Research venues for my kind of research
CV (html) (last update: Jul 2009)

Funding

Our DCSL research group has been funded by agencies and organizations outlined below.

1. National Science Foundation – Engineering directorate through the Sensors program (start date Aug 2003), ECCS division (start date September 2009), and ; Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) NEES grant (start date October 2009); CISE directorate through the Embedded and Hybrid Systems program (start date Aug 2005), the Networking Technology and Systems program (3 projects - start dates Sep 2009, Sep 2008; Aug 2006), the Cybertrust program (start date Jul 2007), the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division (start date Aug 2007), and the Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) Program (start date Mar 2008).

2. Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund – Our sensor network work has been funded through the 6^th round of funds (start date Aug 2004) and the 7^th round of funds (start date April 2007).

3. Private organizations – Lockheed Martin (secure system configuration; starting `08); Intel (sensor network testbed; `04), IBM (automated diagnosis work through the Systems Management group at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY; `03-`06), Avaya (Voice over IP security work through the Networked Systems Research group at Basking Ridge, NJ; `04-present), Tellabs (automated diagnosis and Voice over IP security work through Tellabs Foundation; `05-`06), and Motorola (dependable wireless mesh networks through the Broadband Networks group in Motorola Labs at Austin, TX; `08).

4. Purdue Research Foundation – It provides seed funds for two projects – self checking systems and failure prediction in grid systems.

Professional Activities

I am involved with the following conferences:

· IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN): Program committee chair 2011, Program committee member 2003-current, Organizing committee member 2006 (Fast Abstracts chair), 2010 (Workshop co-chair).

· IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS): Program committee member 2005-2008.

· Others (off and on): International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP): Program committee member 2006; Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing (LADC): Program committee member 2007.

Workshops:

At DSN 2009, I co-organized a workshop called WRAITS (3rd Workshop on Recent Advances on Intrusion-Tolerant Systems), with Miguel Correia (U. of Lisbon) and Partha Pal (BBN Technologies). It was held in Lisbon on June 29, 2009.

I co-organized the workshop called “Dependability Issues in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks and Sensor Networks” (DIWANS) which was held for the first time with DSN 2004 and next with Mobicom 2006. My fellow organizers are Doug Blough (GTech), Paolo Santi (CNR, Italy), Parmesh Ramanathan (Wisconsin), and Shivakant Mishra (Colorado).

Teaching

In Spring 2009, I taught an advanced graduate level course titled "Fault-Tolerant Computer System Design" (ECE 695B). I am involved with a service learning program at Purdue called EPICS. Through this, I have been working with a team of undergraduate students building exhibits for the local children’s museum, the Imagination Station. I was awarded a service learning grant from Purdue University in 2006-07 for this project.

In previous semesters I have taught:

· ECE 369: Discrete Mathematics for Computer Engineering (Fall 2004, 05, Spring 06, Fall 07, Spring 08, Fall 08) – a junior level undergraduate course

· ECE 368: Data Structures and Algorithms (Fall 02, Fall 03) - a junior level undergraduate course

· ECE 695B (earlier ECE 572): Fault Tolerant Computer Systems (Spring 03, Spring 04, Spring 05, Spring 07, Spring 09) – a research oriented course on building dependable computer systems

Short Bio

I joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana as an Assistant Professor in August 2002. I was promoted to be an Associate Professor with tenure in Spring 2008. Before Purdue, I did my Ph.D. from the Computer Science department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finishing in 2001. I worked with Prof. Ravishankar Iyer and Dr. Zbigniew Kalbarczyk at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. My Ph.D. dissertation was on error detection protocols in distributed systems. During my Ph.D. I worked on an adaptive fault-tolerant middleware system called Chameleon. Earlier I had done my MS in June 1998 from the same school and under the same advisor. My undergraduate alma mater is the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur where I did Computer Science and Engineering and graduated in 1996. I worked at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York in the Distributed Messaging Systems group on a project called Gryphon in 2001.

Personal

I have interests in fiction writing, badminton, and classical music (western and eastern). A sampling of pictures taken with my Kodak EasyShare DX6340 can be found here. A page with my current reads and music albums is here. Here is my extended bio. Here is a page on the UIUC server with some tidbits about my interests, which I update from time to time. Here is the web page of somebody very important and very precious.

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