Bharadwaj Satchidanadnan, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, won the best student paper award in the 9th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2017) in Bangalore, India.
Satchidanadnan co-wrote the paper "On Minimal Tests of Sensor Veracity for Dynamic Watermarking-Based Defense of Cyber-Physical Systems," with his Ph.D. adviser, Dr. P.R. Kumar from the Computer Engineering and Systems Group.
Their paper addresses the problem of secure control of networked cyber-physical systems. More specifically, they consider the problem of controlling a physical plant with multiple inputs and multiple outputs, where the sensors measuring some of the outputs may be malicious. The malicious sensors can collude and report false measurements, fabricated possibly strategically, in order to achieve any objective that they may have, such as destabilizing the closed-loop system or increasing its running cost. In his paper, Satchidanadnan proposes a general technique termed Dynamic Watermarking, which allows the controller to detect such malicious sensors in the system and prevent them from causing performance degradation.
Satchidanandan earned his master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, where he worked on wireless communications. Between May 2015 and August 2015, he interned at Intel Labs in Santa Clara, California, where he worked on interference cancellation algorithms for next generation wireless networks. His research interests include cyberphysical systems, power systems, security, database privacy, communications, control and signal processing.