Bala Natarajan

The connection between the physical world and the internet enabled by the “Internet of things” is expected to change our lives in more ways than we can currently imagine. This is definitely true in the case of critical infrastructures, as IoT is what makes the power grid “smart”.  The design, performance and reliability analysis of the physical systems have to systematically include the role of cyber infrastructure and can no longer be characterized in isolation. In this seminar, we will first look at the problem of compressive sensing based data aggregation in a power distribution grid.  Then, we will present some fundamental results on centralized and distributed estimation and control of a spatially distributed cyber physical system (a generalization of the distribution grid) over a lossy communication network. Lastly, we will consider the role of an active consumer and how one might use differential pricing to control the load profile. 

Biography:

Bala Natarajan received his B.E (Honors) degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1997 and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, in 2002. Since Fall 2002, he has been a Faculty Member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, where he is currently Clair N Palmer and Sara M Palmer Endowed Professor and the Director of the Wireless Communication and Information Processing Research Group. His core research expertise lies in the areas of statistical signal processing, stochastic modeling, optimization and control theories. He has worked on applications spanning wireless communications, sensor networks, biomedical and cyber physical systems. He has published nearly 150 refereed journal and conference articles along with a book titled Multi-carrier Technologies for Wireless Communications. He holds a patent on customized spreading sequence design algorithm for CDMA systems. He is a senior member of IEEE and currently serves as the editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, one of the top journals in the area of wireless communications. He also serves as the representative of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society in the IEEE Smart Grid R&D committee and the IEEE Committee on RFID. 

Bala Natarajan

Biography: