Seminar Series Archive
Abhishek Dubey
Vanderbilt University
March 6, 2020
11:00am - 12:00pm
Title:
Principled Approaches for Resilient Decision Procedures in Smart and Connected Communities
Abstract:
Communities worldwide are dealing with a number of stresses whose outcomes will ultimately decide the ability of humanity to maintain a sustainable and resilient future. This is particularly true of urban environments, where explosive growth and shifting demographics is placing greater demands on the ability of critical infrastructure systems to perform reliably and without interruption. Against this backdrop is the emergence of technologies, both hardware and software, that offer the potential for more intelligent approaches to establishing and maintaining livable and sustainable communities. Smart sensors (e.g., cameras, air quality monitors, geographic positioning) are now embedded in almost every physical device and system we use. This information is being utilized with new modes of networking, distributed computing, and machine learning algorithms for high-resolution data-driven analysis in support of a safe, secure, efficient, and productive environment. Yet, such technology comes with a set of challenges governing the integrity and reliability of the data driven decision procedures, especially if they are going to be implemented in practice for the human in the loop decisions. Solutions have to be cross-layered and must integrate efficient anomaly detection (to detect physical and cyber disruptions), data distribution shift detection (to understand when the machine learning models are going to be imprecise), resilient architectural design principles (to minimize the likelihood of failures). In this talk I will describe innovations developed in my lab across the information architecture layer (dynamic reconfiguration), data distribution layer (fast and efficient anomaly detection) and decision procedure layer (decentralization mechanisms) for three applications domains: smart transit systems, smart energy distribution and smart emergency response systems, all of which are critical for our communities.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Abhishek Dubey is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Software-Integrated Systems. Abhishek directs the SCOPE lab (Smart and resilient Computing for Physical Environment) at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems and is the co-lead of Vanderbilt Initiative for Smart Cities Operation and Research (VISOR). His broad research interest lies in the resilient system design of cyber physical systems. He is specially interested in performance management, online failure detection, isolation and recovery in smart and connected cyber-physical systems, with a focus on transportation networks and smart grid. His key contributions include the development and deployment of resilience decision support systems for Metropolitan Transit Authority in Nashville, a robust incident prediction and dispatch system developed for Nashville Fire Department and a privacy-preserving decentralized system for peer-to-peer energy exchange. His other contributions include middleware for online fault-detection and recovery in software intensive distributed systems and a robust software model for building cyber-physical applications, along with spatial and temporal separation among different system components, which guarantees fault isolation. Recently, this work has been adapted for fault detection and isolation in breaker assemblies in power transmission lines. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, DOE, ARPA-E, AFRL, DARPA, Siemens, Cisco and IBM. Abhishek completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 2009 in the area of fault detection and isolation for large computing clusters. He received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in August 2005 and completed his undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, India in May 2001.