Hi! I am Purboday. I currently work as a Senior Software Engineer at Growing Energy Labs, Inc., a subsidiary of Hanwha Qcells, where I work on their design time simulations platform. I have a PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University, where I worked under the guidance of Prof. Gabor Karsai at the Vanderbilt Institute for Software Integrated Systems. I am a cyber physical systems researcher who works at the interface of computing and physical processes in order to build highly scalable, safe and performant systems that can solve some of society’s most challenging problems in areas such as power grids, transportation systems and so on.

Research Interests

I am interested in decentralized software pipelines based on which sophisticated control and management applications for large scale cyber phsyical systems can be built, particularly in their fault-tolerance capabilities. The key question to ask in such tightly coupled systems is how can the computing and physical layers be designed such that they can inform the considerations, features and assumptions of each other and react to changes in them to realize an integrated, robust system able to deliver the system specifications? I have worked on distributed middleware frameworks for running distributed message-passing based systems utilizing various communication patterns such as publish-subscribe and client-server. I have extensively used model-based engineering concepts and techniques to represent the behavior of such systems and analyze them.

For my dissertation titled Fault Tolerance Design Approaches for Distributed Cyber Physical Systems with Applications in Energy Systems I explored techniques to design fault-tolerant distributed applications that go beyond classical questions of fault-tolerant computing. Using case studies from the energy systems field, it highlights how the computing software and communication layer can detect and react to faults within the cyber infrastructure and determine approaches to either mitigate it or recover from it. I used hardware-in-the-loop simulation combining plant simulation of microgrids and distribution systems on simulation platforms like OpenDSS with distributed control algorithms running on embedded edge devices like Beaglebone Black communicating with each other.

I am looking for research and development roles in the future wehre I can continue to expand my knowledge and experience in resilient control and management software for societal scale cyber physical systems. In particular, I am interested in working on problems related to how the computing layer can cope with failure events in the physical environment or processes such as natural disasters, equipment failures etc. and how predictive approaches using learning-enabled components can be leveraged to counteract against them. I am also looking to take up more leadership and mentoring opportunities within a research setting since I enjoy the teaching process.

If you are interested in these areas and want to chat or collaborate, please feel free to reach out at purboday [dot] ghosh [at] vanderbilt [dot] edu.