Joined department: 2004

Professor Bagchi's research interests are in the areas of large-scale distributed systems, reliable and secure systems, and dependable wired and wireless computer networks. He is interested in the question of how to build heterogeneous large-scale distributed systems that are reliable in the face of natural and malicious faults. 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. 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. He considers intrusions to be an increasingly important class of faults and is therefore looking at the design of intrusion tolerant systems. He also designs customized fault tolerant solutions for dependable wireless networks, such as sensor and mesh networks.

There are four current projects in Professor Bagchi's lab—the Dependable Computing Systems Lab (DCSL). The first project is building a monitoring system for detection and diagnosis of failures in distributed applications by observing the message interactions among the protocol entities. The second project is building an intrusion tolerant system that can contain and respond to security attacks at runtime, the current application testbed being a distributed e-commerce system. The third project is building dependable practical sensor and mesh networks, through protocols for reliable data dissemination, detection and isolation of nodes involved in control and data attacks, and reliable reprogramming of the network. The fourth project is looking at reliable execution of tasks in a grid system incorporating failure prediction and efficient checkpoint-restart. For details of the research projects, take a look at the home page of the Dependable Computing Systems Research Group at http://www.ece.purdue.edu/~dcsl.

Professor Bagchi is a member of the Organizing Committee and the Program Committee for the International Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). He has been an invited member to the meetings of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable and Fault Tolerant Computing, which is a select group of researchers in the field. He has served on the Program Committees for SRDS, ICPP, and LADC. He leads NSF sponsored research projects on reliable real-time sensor networks using directional antennas, detection and diagnosis of failures in embedded networks, and detection and mitigation of control and data attacks in multi-hop wireless networks. He is collaborating with the University of Notre Dame through an Indiana 21st Century grant on remedying the combined sewage overflow (CSO) problem in cities of Indiana through the use of smart sensors and actuators. He has organized a workshop on dependable ad hoc and sensor networks called DIWANS that was held with DSN (2004) and Mobicom (2006). His papers have been runner-up for the best paper award at IEEE High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC; 2006), IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS; 2005), and IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN; 2005). He is a member of CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) and CWSA (Center for Wireless Systems and Applications) and a faculty fellow of the Cyber Center at Purdue University. In addition to the federal and state government support, his work has been supported by several private corporations-IBM, Avaya, and Intel.