March 18, 2015: Invited Speaker Seminar: Secure Distributed State Estimation in Cyber-Physical Systems

Dr. Arash Mohammadi

Wednesday, March 18 at 2:30 p.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

We live in an era of data deluge. The volume, variety, and velocity of data is exploding and the ability to process such large amounts of information promises to limit the spread of epidemics, learn the dynamics of emergent social-computational systems, and protect critical infrastructures. Of particular interest to this talk is the big data collected from Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which exhibit a wide range of diversities. The CPSs are engineering systems with embedded control, communication and sensing capabilities that can interact with humans through cyber space. Recently there has been a surge of interest in practical and opportunistic applications of CPSs including: (i) State prediction for analyzing contingencies and taking preventive actions against possible failures in smart power grids; (ii) Optimizing the reliability of CPSs using decentralized sensor resource management techniques, and; (iii) Surveillance applications for following a reference target in decentralized camera networks. State forecasting is the core part of all these problems, which is the focus of this talk.

The first part of this talk is devoted to large-scale CPSs with nonlinear dynamics and sparse observations. I present a multi-rate consensus/fusion based distributed estimation framework for scenarios where network connectivity is intermittent. A novel distributed sensor selection algorithm is then presented with the objective of dynamically activating a time-variant subset of sensor nodes for adaptive resource management in CPSs.

The second part of this talk is motivated by recent evolution of cutting-edge sensor technologies with complex-valued measurements in CPSs. The rapid growth of CPSs and the fact that their applications are safety critical makes identification and prevention of smart cyber-attacks on their control unit of significant practical importance. I propose/expose non-circular data injection attack model and present a novel detection methodology by transforming the attack detection problem into the problem of comparing statistical distance measures.

Biography

Arash Mohammadi received B.Sc. degree in Control Engineering form Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Tehran in 2005, the M.Sc. degree in Bioelectrics from Biomedical Engineering Department of Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in 2007, and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering form department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of York University in November 2013. Since December 2013, he is with Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, ON, Canada, as a Postdoctoral Fellow. His research interests include: cyber-physical systems; information fusion; distributed signal processing for agent networks; secure networked control systems; consensus algorithms, large-scale dynamical systems, and; smart grids. He has authored about 40 technical contributions, including invited ones, published in international journals and conference proceedings of high caliber.

Dr. Mohammadi is a member of International Society of Information Fusion, IEEE Signal Processing Society, IEEE Communications Society, and IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society. He has received several distinguishing awards, including the Eshrat Arjomandi Award for outstanding Ph.D. dissertation from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of York University in 2013, and one of the best student paper awards from IEEE International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION'12). He is a reviewer for different international journals including IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and IEEE Computer Magazine.