ECE Faculty Saurabh Bagchi Selected to Membership of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
Saurabh Bagchi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, has been elevated to membership of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) 10.4 Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance for his contribution to dependable autonomous systems. The elevation was announced by the IFIP in July 2020. This Working Group was established in 1980 by the IFIP general assembly, with the goal of providing a forum for intellectual leadership in the area of dependable computing. The notion of dependability is defined as the ability of a system to avoid service failures despite the presence of natural and maliciously induced faults.
The working group consists of a select group of research leaders in the field of dependable computing. It is an international body with members from 17 countries. Membership is by invitation only, upon the nomination of a group member and careful review of the candidate’s scholarship and leadership qualities, and a majority vote by the members. Its current membership is at 60 with 1-2 new members being added each year. The working group counts among its members the president and the dean of the College of Engineering at CMU, chaired professors at Illinois, Austin, US Naval Academy, and Duke. It has representation from technical leaders at various companies like IBM, Honeywell, AT&T Labs, Raytheon, Hitachi, and PNNL.
“I look to joining such eminent members of our technical community and contributing actively to the group’s mission to lead advances in dependable computing systems and translate them to practice and policy,” said Bagchi.
The working group organizes two workshops each year for its members and for a select group of external invitees. These workshops feature in-depth discussions of important technical topics in the area of dependability and lead to a workshop report that is widely disseminated and followed. The working group members are also called on to advise strategic policy making bodies in various countries and at trans-national organizations. For example, a subset of members of this IFIP group, including Bagchi, have been asked to advise the G20 Leaders’ Summit to be held in November 2020. The group is advising the leaders on how the digital revolution will affect and be affected by black swan events like what happened in COVID-19, and how policymakers should set policies, legislation, and rules to make response systems more adaptable and reactive. Cybersecurity and AI are two important components of the charter for this working group.
“As a group, we have been following up on Professor Bagchi’s research for a while, he is definitely one of the up and coming young stars in the field," said Mootaz Elnozahy, chair of the WG10.4 working group.
Bagchi was inducted as a member at the virtual meeting of the IFIP WG 10.4 held in June and will be inducted in person at the meeting in June 2021 in Taiwan.