I am a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy) at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. I am the founding Director of a university-wide resilience center CRISP, started in 2018. I received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2018), the Adobe Faculty Award (2017), the AT&T Labs VURI Award (2016), the Google Faculty Award (2015), and the IBM Faculty Award (2014). I am an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2013), a Senior Member of IEEE (2007) and of ACM (2009), and a Distinguished Speaker for ACM (2012). I serve on the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors for the 2017-20 term.

My research interests are in distributed systems and dependable computing. I am proudest of the 21 PhD students and 50 Masters thesis students who have graduated from our research group and are in various stages of building wonderful careers in industry or academia. In our group of 12 graduate students, 3 undergraduate students, and 3 Research Scientists, we have far too much fun building and breaking real systems. Along the way, we have won or been runner up for 11 best paper awards at IEEE/ACM conferences.

I received the MS and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in the Computer Science department, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. I worked with Prof. Ravishankar Iyer and Dr. Zbigniew Kalbarczyk there. My Ph.D. dissertation was on error detection protocols in distributed systems [ pdf ]. My undergraduate alma mater is the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur where I did Computer Science and Engineering. I worked at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York in the Distributed Messaging Systems group on a project called Gryphon in 2001. 

If you want the gory details, here is the full CV (pdf) (html). [Last update: Aug 2019]

If you want a meandering look, here is the non-linear version of my bio. (html)

"Dependability meets Data Analytics, and at Large Scales"

The above sums up our current research direction. We work on software systems to enable them to perform their functionality in the face of natural and malicious failures. We apply and adapt data analytic techniques to work with the noise of computer systems and at large system scales. Current application domains come from distributed software systems, embedded systems, cellular systems, and bioinformatics.

The broad goal of our research is to design practical dependable distributed systems. This finds expression in various domains, which currently include, embedded “bare metal” systems, networks of interdependent assets from multiple ownership domains, cellular and wireless systems, enterprise networks, and supercomputing clusters.

For details of my research projects, take a look at the home page of the Dependable Computing Systems Lab (DCSL), its Projects page, and the Research Overview document.

• Research overview
• Research impact
• Dependable Computing Systems Lab (DCSL)
• Publications
• Five significant publications

Our funding comes from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense (Army Research Lab, Missile Defense Agency), Department of Energy, NIH, multiple private organizations (Northrop Grumman, Adobe, Google, AT&T), and Purdue's Research Foundation. Past funding has also come from Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund and private organizations (GE Research, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Avaya, Tellabs, Motorola, Intel).

If you are interested in working in the research group, please take a look at the process for this outlined here.  

Saurabh Bagchi [Contact info]

Last updated: March 21, 2020

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