Logo for IEEE Computer Society North America Student Challenge Competition 2024
[December 2024] We organized the IEEE Computer Society’s only Student Challenge Competition across all of North America. 43 teams participated and the three winning teams were decided and awarded at the IEEE Big Data Conference in Washington DC in December.
One form of regulating AI is watermarking its output – the equivalent of AI signing its work. R_Type/iStock via Getty Images
[January 2024] Reining in AI means figuring out which regulation options are feasible, both technically and economically. Here is my take on 4 aspects of this AI regulation debate.
[January 2024] Attempts to weaponize Gen AI will accelerate in 2024 but will not irretrievably break our cyber world. We have all been startled by the power of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its ilk of Gen AI tools, like Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama. One crucial question in 2024 will be, can these be weaponized to make our cyberspace more insecure.
[May 2023] For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. What does black box mean in the world of artificial intelligence? We explain.
[March 2023] Read about how OpenAI’s ChatGPT and upcoming Artificial Intelligence tools may soon replace jobs from U.S. workers, and even software developers. Professor Saurabh Bagchi discusses his own view on these AI technologies.
Saurabh Bagchi, Purdue University at an embedded autonomy testbed which is used to design and evaluate attacks and defenses against critical infrastructure
[October 2022] Our NSF project on critical infrastructure protection shows how to integrate human behavioral biases into the security investments that are made. The article goes into our demonstration on models of a smart grid, industrial control system, e-commerce platform, and web-based telecommunications network.
Rebecca Barocco, a postdoc at University of Florida, works with a drone used to collect visual, multispectral, and thermal data. The IoT4Ag team is developing soil sensors that they hope can be read from above by drones such as this one. Photograph: Tyler Jones, UF IFAS.
[June 2021] Our WHIN center project on IoT for digital agriculture in profiled in a story in BioScience. Our work is put in a broader context with several related efforts all through the country.
Army’s Assured Autonomy Innovation Institute (A2I2)
A soldier hand-launches a drone during operational testing at Fort Benning, Georgia. (U.S. Army Operational Test Command photo/Tad Browning)
[October 2020] This was the kickoff of our 5-year project funded by the Army Research Lab to be a part of their Artificial Intelligence Assured Autonomy Innovation Institute (A2I2). Joint between Purdue and Princeton, with Saurabh as PI, this work is meant to develop secure distributed autonomous software for the battlefield and civilian relief and rescue.
Sharing innovations from Computer systems research
[September 2020] An article written by Saurabh that appeared in Purdue College of Engineering’s Medium channel, on how computer systems innovations can be made more replicable and through that, broadly adopted. [ Medium article ]
Security of wearable devices
[July 2020] Google corrected a security vulnerability in its Wear OS smartwatches that could have allowed attackers to crash specific applications, render the app or the watch unresponsive, or cause continuous reboots. We found this using our Vulcan tool [Mobisys-2020], reported it to Google, and then worked with them to get it replicated. Google to its credit rolled out a fix with its next update.
[February-June 2020] Our work on streaming apps (yes you read that right, not streaming media) to mobile devices so as to mitigate the storage crunch gets noticed in the popular press. This is the subject of our EWSN 2020 paper. This is work done by PhD alum Nawanol Theera (now a faculty in Thailand), graduate student Shikhar Suryavansh, undergraduate student Sameer Manchanda (now a graduate student at UIUC), AT&T researchers Rajesh Panta and Kaustubh Joshi, Mostafa Ammar (Georgia Tech), and Mung Chiang and Saurabh. [ Paper ] [ Web page ]
Inside Indiana Business: Saurabh was interviewed for this program and the interview ran on television stations in the state, including the Public Television Station, WFYI of Indianapolis.
Conte supercomputer cluster at Purdue, one of the clusters whose data we have published in the open-source computer usage and failure repository, Fresco
[May 2020] This Purdue news story profiles the large public workload and failure data repository from production computing clusters in a university setting, Fresco (for Purdue and UT Austin) and Monet (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). This is the result of three awards from the National Science Foundation (award numbers 1405906, 1513051, and 1513197) totaling over $1.1 million.
Sophia: the tuner for distributed databases and Ashraf, the lead student on the project
[May 2020] This Purdue news story profiles our NIH project that allows distributed NoSQL databases to be reconfigured online. This work is used for keeping MG-RAST, the world’s largest metagenomics portal and analysis pipeline, running as fast as it can, without suffering any downtime due to the reconfiguration. A US patent application has been filed for this work.
[March 2018] Our ransomware defense technique, R2D2, is profiled in Bleeping Computer, the Register (UK). This is work done by PhD alum Chris Gutierrez (now at Intel), undergraduate alum Tom Yurek (now a PhD student at UIUC), Gene Spafford, and Saurabh. [ Web page ] [ Web page ]
[November 2017] Our work on game theory and cybersecurity is profiled. The work involves colleagues Shreyas Sundaram (ECE), Tim Cason (Economics) and graduate students Mostafa Abdalla and Aritra Mitra. [ Web page ] [ NSF CPS-VO ] [ Phys.org ] [ Homeland Security Newswire ]
[February 2018] The part of this work that is jointly done with Sandia National Labs is profiled in Sandia’s quarterly news release on their academic alliance partnerships. [ PDF ]
[April 2017] DCSL graduate students Tara Thomas and Heng Zhang are featured in a US News article on the career options open after graduate school in Computer Engineering. [ Web page ]
[April 2017] The panel that we organized at the CERIAS Annual Symposium on “Security through Formal Methods and Secure Architecture”. Saurabh was moderating the panel and the panelists were Ben Delaware (Purdue), Roopsha Samanta (Purdue), and Matt Wilding (Principal Engineering Manager, Rockwell Collins). [ Video ]
[October 2016] Our NIH project on the metagenomics system called MG-RAST, jointly with Argonne National Lab. This project, funded as an NIH R01 through the NIAID institute, is going to go from 2016-21. This lays the foundation for a new distributed cyberinfrastructure for handling large volumes of metagenomics data and processing. [ Purdue story ] [ Genome Web ]
[October 2016] Saurabh is elected to be on the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors. The Board of Governors sets the direction and determines the strategy for the Computer Society, and provides guidance at the policy level to all Society organizational entities. At each election cycle, there are 7 members elected to serve on the Board of Governors. [ Purdue story ] [ IEEE ]
[July 2014] “Supercomputing tools speed simulations”. Our work with Lawrence Livermore National Lab on building tools for automated problem debugging is highlighted. The article talks of important simulations that were helped by our technique and tool. [ LLNL ]
[June 2012] Our work on speeding up the simulations by detecting nascent errors in the large Department of Energy supercomputers was highlighted. [ Purdue story ] [ Science Daily ] [ Purdue Exponent ]
[August 2013] Our project with the Missile Defense Agency is highlighted. This project started in 2012 and continuing till now (2017) is building a discrete event simulation for the MDA enhanced ballistic missile defense system. [ Purdue story ] [ ACM ] [ Supercomputing Online ]