Professor Shreyas Sundaram has received the NSF CAREER Award for his proposal "Towards Secure Large-Scale Networked Systems: Resilient Distributed Algorithms for Coordination in Networks under Cyber Attacks".

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. NSF encourages submission of CAREER proposals from early-career faculty at all CAREER-eligible organizations and especially encourages women, members of underrepresented minority groups, and persons with disabilities to apply.

Professor Sundaram’s research focuses on large-scale networked systems (such as the power grid, the internet, multi-robot systems, and smart cities), which consist of a large number of interconnected components. To allow the entire system to function efficiently, these components must communicate with each other and use the exchanged information in order to estimate the state of the entire system and take optimal actions. However, such large-scale networked systems are also increasingly under threat from sophisticated cyber-attacks that can compromise some of the components and cause them to behave erratically or inject malicious information into the network. Existing algorithms for distributed coordination in large-scale networks are highly vulnerable to such attacks.

Professor Sundaram’s project will address this critical problem by creating new algorithms to enable components in large-scale networks to cooperatively take optimal actions and estimate the state of the system despite attacks on a large number of the components.  The research agenda is focused along three thrusts: (i) designing resilient algorithms for distributed optimization of static objective functions, (ii) designing resilient learning algorithms for settings where optimization objectives change over time, and (iii) designing resilient distributed state estimators for large scale dynamical systems.  The research will lead to a greater understanding of the fundamental factors that affect the resilience of distributed coordination algorithms, and establish systematic procedures to design large-scale networked systems and critical infrastructures that are capable of operating in a near-optimal manner under attacks. In addition to the technical and scientific contributions, Professor Sundaram will also train students in the design of secure networked systems, and will engage the local community in central Indiana in learning about networks.