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Abdullah Al Maruf

Publications and source records attributed to Abdullah Al Maruf.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Observability Blocking in a Linear Synchronization Network with Partial State Measurements

Large-scale networked systems are increasingly vulnerable to adversaries that can infer system dynamics from a small set of compromised nodes. This paper addresses the problem of blocking such inference using limited state information. While existing state-feedback methods achieve observability blocking with eigenvalue preservation, they require full state access and are impractical for large networks. We propose multiple control strategies that operate under partial state measurements. The first approach employs output feedback to achieve observability blocking while preserving a subset of open-loop eigenvalues. The second approach leverages an observer to reconstruct the system state and enables full-state feedback control, preserving all eigenvalues and providing greater flexibility in sensor placement. We further extend the observer-based design to a distributed framework. Numerical examples demonstrate the scope and validity of the proposed methods.

eess.SY↗

A Scalable Design Approach to Resilient Architectures for Interconnected Cyber-Physical Systems: Safety Guarantees under Multiple Attacks

Complex, interconnected cyber-physical systems (CPS) are increasingly prevalent in domains such as power systems. Cyber-resilient architectures have been proposed to recover compromised cyber components of CPS. Recent works have studied tuning the recovery times of such architectures to guarantee safety in single-system settings. Extending these designs to interconnected CPS is more challenging, since solutions must account for attacks on multiple subsystems that can occur in any order and potentially infinite possible temporal overlap. This paper aims to address the aforementioned challenge by developing a scalable framework to assign resilient architectures and to inform the tuning of their recovery times. Our approach introduces a scalar index that quantifies the impact of each subsystem on safety under compromised input. These indices aggregate linearly across subsystems, enabling scalable analysis under arbitrary attack orderings and temporal overlaps. We establish a linear inequality relating each subsystem's index and recovery time that guarantees safety and guides resilient architecture assignment. We also propose a segmentation-based approach to strengthen the previously derived conditions. We then present algorithms to compute the proposed indices and to find a cost-optimal architecture assignment with a safety guarantee. We validate the framework through a case study on temperature regulation in interconnected rooms under different attack scenarios.

eess.SY↗

EmoBang: Detecting Emotion From Bengali Texts

Emotion detection from text seeks to identify an individual's emotional or mental state - positive, negative, or neutral - based on linguistic cues. While significant progress has been made for English and other high-resource languages, Bengali remains underexplored despite being the world's fourth most spoken language. The lack of large, standardized datasets classifies Bengali as a low-resource language for emotion detection. Existing studies mainly employ classical machine learning models with traditional feature engineering, yielding limited performance. In this paper, we introduce a new Bengali emotion dataset annotated across eight emotion categories and propose two models for automatic emotion detection: (i) a hybrid Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) model (EmoBangHybrid) and (ii) an AdaBoost-Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) ensemble model (EmoBangEnsemble). Additionally, we evaluate six baseline models with five feature engineering techniques and assess zero-shot and few-shot large language models (LLMs) on the dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive benchmark for Bengali emotion detection. Experimental results show that EmoBangH and EmoBangE achieve accuracies of 92.86% and 93.69%, respectively, outperforming existing methods and establishing strong baselines for future research.

cs.CL↗

Mode Participation and Inter-Area-Observability Blocking Controllers for Power Networks

In recent papers [1] and [2], the second author developed full-state feedback controllers for networked systems to block the observability and controllability of certain remote nodes. In this paper, we build on these control schemes to an interconnected power system with the aims of blocking (i) mode participation factors and (ii) inter-area mode observability in tie-line power flow measurements. Since participation factors depend on both controllable and observable eigenvectors, the control techniques from the cited works must be carefully tailored to this setting. Our research is motivated by cyber-security concerns in power systems, where an adversary aims to deceive the operator by tampering the system's modal content. We present extensive numerical results on a 3-machine, 9-bus system and a 16-machine, 68-bus system.

math.OC↗

Observability-Blocking Controls for Double-Integrator and Higher Order Integrator Networks

The design of state-feedback controls to block observability at remote nodes is studied for double integrator network (DIN) and higher order integrator network models. A preliminary design algorithm is presented first for DIN that requires $m+2$ actuation nodes to block observability for the measurement obtained from a set of $m$ nodes. The algorithm is based on eigenstructure assignment technique and leverages the properties of the eigenvectors in DIN. Next, the topological structure of the network is exploited to reduce the number of controllers required for blocking observability. The number of actuation nodes in sparser design depends on the cardinality of a cutset separating the actuation and measurement locations. Later, the design principles are generalized for blocking observability in $N$-th order integrator network models.

eess.SY↗

Leveraging Gene Expression Data and Explainable Machine Learning for Enhanced Early Detection of Type 2 Diabetes

Diabetes, particularly Type 2 diabetes (T2D), poses a substantial global health burden, compounded by its associated complications such as cardiovascular diseases, kidney failure, and vision impairment. Early detection of T2D is critical for improving healthcare outcomes and optimizing resource allocation. In this study, we address the gap in early T2D detection by leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques on gene expression data obtained from T2D patients. Our primary objective was to enhance the accuracy of early T2D detection through advanced ML methodologies and increase the model's trustworthiness using the explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) technique. Analyzing the biological mechanisms underlying T2D through gene expression datasets represents a novel research frontier, relatively less explored in previous studies. While numerous investigations have focused on utilizing clinical and demographic data for T2D prediction, the integration of molecular insights from gene expression datasets offers a unique and promising avenue for understanding the pathophysiology of the disease. By employing six ML classifiers on data sourced from NCBI's Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), we observed promising performance across all models. Notably, the XGBoost classifier exhibited the highest accuracy, achieving 97%. Our study addresses a notable gap in early T2D detection methodologies, emphasizing the importance of leveraging gene expression data and advanced ML techniques.

q-bio.GN↗

Small-Signal Dynamics of Lossy Inverter-Based Microgrids for Generalized Droop Controls

A network-level small-signal model is developed for lossy microgrids, which considers coupled angle and voltage dynamics of inverter-based microgrids and uses a more general framework of droop controls in the inverter. It is shown that when relative resistances of the lines in the microgrid are reasonably consistent and differences of voltage angles across the lines are small at the operating point, the generalized droop controls can be designed to enforce decoupling between angle dynamics and voltage dynamics. Next, structural results for the asymptotic stability of small-signal angle and voltage dynamics are given for the case when generalized droop control achieves decoupling. Simulated transient responses of a modified IEEE 9-bus system are presented to validate the theoretical findings which show the effectiveness of generalized droop controls in independently shaping the settling times of the angle and voltage responses of the lossy microgrid system.

eess.SY↗

An Exploration Into Web Session Security- A Systematic Literature Review

The most common attacks against web sessions are reviewed in this paper, for example, some attacks against web browsers' honest users attempting to create session with trusted web browser application legally. We have assessed with four different ways to judge the viability of a certain solution by reviewing existing security solutions which prevent or halt the different attacks. Then we have pointed out some guidelines that have been taken into account by the designers of the proposals we reviewed. The guidelines we have identified will be helpful for the creative solutions proceeding web security in a more structured and holistic way.

cs.SE↗

Risk-Aware Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Autonomous cyber and cyber-physical systems need to perform decision-making, learning, and control in unknown environments. Such decision-making can be sensitive to multiple factors, including modeling errors, changes in costs, and impacts of events in the tails of probability distributions. Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides a framework for learning behaviors through repeated interactions with the environment by minimizing an average cost, it will not be adequate to overcome the above challenges. In this paper, we develop a distributed MARL approach to solve decision-making problems in unknown environments by learning risk-aware actions. We use the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) to characterize the cost function that is being minimized, and define a Bellman operator to characterize the value function associated to a given state-action pair. We prove that this operator satisfies a contraction property, and that it converges to the optimal value function. We then propose a distributed MARL algorithm called the CVaR QD-Learning algorithm, and establish that value functions of individual agents reaches consensus. We identify several challenges that arise in the implementation of the CVaR QD-Learning algorithm, and present solutions to overcome these. We evaluate the CVaR QD-Learning algorithm through simulations, and demonstrate the effect of a risk parameter on value functions at consensus.

cs.AI↗

A Compositional Resilience Index for Computationally Efficient Safety Analysis of Interconnected Systems

Interconnected systems such as power systems and chemical processes are often required to satisfy safety properties in the presence of faults and attacks. Verifying safety of these systems, however, is computationally challenging due to nonlinear dynamics, high dimensionality, and combinatorial number of possible faults and attacks that can be incurred by the subsystems interconnected within the network. In this paper, we develop a compositional resilience index to verify safety properties of interconnected systems under faults and attacks. The resilience index is a tuple serving the following two purposes. First, it quantifies how a safety property is impacted when a subsystem is compromised by faults and attacks. Second, the resilience index characterizes the needed behavior of a subsystem during normal operations to ensure safety violations will not occur when future adverse events occur. We develop a set of sufficient conditions on the dynamics of each subsystem to satisfy its safety constraint, and leverage these conditions to formulate an optimization program to compute the resilience index. When multiple subsystems are interconnected and their resilience indices are given, we show that the safety constraints of the interconnected system can be efficiently verified by solving a system of linear inequalities. We demonstrate our developed resilience index using a numerical case study on chemical reactors connected in series.

eess.SY↗

A Timing-Based Framework for Designing Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems under Safety Constraint

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are required to satisfy safety constraints in various application domains such as robotics, industrial manufacturing systems, and power systems. Faults and cyber attacks have been shown to cause safety violations, which can damage the system and endanger human lives. Resilient architectures have been proposed to ensure safety of CPS under such faults and attacks via methodologies including redundancy and restarting from safe operating conditions. The existing resilient architectures for CPS utilize different mechanisms to guarantee safety, and currently there is no approach to compare them. Moreover, the analysis and design undertaken for CPS employing one architecture is not readily extendable to another. In this paper, we propose a timing-based framework for CPS employing various resilient architectures and develop a common methodology for safety analysis and computation of control policies and design parameters. Using the insight that the cyber subsystem operates in one out of a finite number of statuses, we first develop a hybrid system model that captures CPS adopting any of these architectures. Based on the hybrid system, we formulate the problem of joint computation of control policies and associated timing parameters for CPS to satisfy a given safety constraint and derive sufficient conditions for the solution. Utilizing the derived conditions, we provide an algorithm to compute control policies and timing parameters relevant to the employed architecture. We also note that our solution can be applied to a wide class of CPS with polynomial dynamics and also allows incorporation of new architectures. We verify our proposed framework by performing a case study on adaptive cruise control of vehicles.

eess.SY↗

Microvision: Static analysis-based approach to visualizing microservices in augmented reality

Microservices are supporting digital transformation; however, fundamental tools and system perspectives are missing to better observe, understand, and manage these systems, their properties, and their dependencies. Microservices architecture leans toward decentralization, which yields many advantages to system operation; it, however, brings challenges to their development. Microservices lack a system-centric perspective to better cope with system evolution and quality assessment. In this work, we explore microservice-specific architecture reconstruction based on static analysis. Such reconstruction typically results in system models to visualize selected system-centric perspectives. Conventional models are limited in utility when the service cardinality is high. We consider an alternative data visualization using 3D space using augmented reality. To begin testing the feasibility of deriving such perspectives from microservice systems, we developed and implemented prototype tools for software architecture reconstruction and visualization of compared perspectives.

cs.SE↗

Microservice Architecture Reconstruction and Visualization Techniques: A Review

Microservice system solutions are driving digital transformation; however, fundamental tools and system perspectives are missing to better observe, understand, and manage these systems, their properties, and their dependencies. Microservices architecture leads towards decentralization, which implies many advantages to system operation; it, however, brings challenges to their development. Microservice systems often lack a system-centric perspective that would help engineers better cope with system evolution and quality assessment. In this work, we explored microservice-specific architecture reconstruction based on static analysis. Such reconstruction typically results in system models to visualize selected system-centric perspectives. Conventional models involve 2D methods; however, these methods are limited in utility when services proliferate. We considered various architectural perspectives relevant to microservices and assessed the relevancy of the traditional method, comparing it to alternative data visualization using 3D space. As a representative of the 3D method, we considered a 3D graph model presented in augmented reality. To begin testing the feasibility of deriving such perspectives from microservice systems, we developed and implemented prototype tools for software architecture reconstruction and visualization of compared perspectives. Using these prototypes, we performed a small user study with software practitioners to highlight the potentials and limitations of these innovative visualizations used for common practitioner reasoning and tasks.

cs.SE↗

Using Microservice Telemetry Data for System Dynamic Analysis

Microservices bring various benefits to software systems. They also bring decentralization and lose coupling across self-contained system parts. Since these systems likely evolve in a decentralized manner, they need to be monitored to identify when possibly poorly designed extensions deteriorate the overall system quality. For monolith systems, such tasks have been commonly addressed through static analysis. However, given the decentralization and possible language diversity across microservices, static analysis tools are lacking. On the other hand, there are available tools commonly used by practitioners that offer centralized logging, tracing, and metric collection for microservices. In this paper, we assess the opportunity to combine current dynamic analysis tools with anomaly detection in the form of quality metrics and anti-patterns. We develop a tool prototype that we use to assess a large microservice system benchmark demonstrating the feasibility and potential of such an approach.

cs.SE↗

Survey on Tools and Techniques Detecting Microservice API Patterns

It is well recognized that design patterns improve system development and maintenance in many aspects. While we commonly recognize these patterns in monolithic systems, many patterns emerged for cloud computing, specifically microservices. Unfortunately, while various patterns have been proposed, available quality assessment tools often do not recognize many. This article performs a grey literature review to find and catalog available tools to detect microservice API patterns (MAP). It reasons about mechanisms that can be used to detect these patterns. Furthermore, the results indicate gaps and opportunities for improvements for quality assessment tools. Finally, the reader is provided with a route map to detection techniques that can be used to mine MAPs.

cs.SE↗

A Compositional Approach to Safety-Critical Resilient Control for Systems with Coupled Dynamics

Complex, interconnected Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) are increasingly common in applications including smart grids and transportation. Ensuring safety of interconnected systems whose dynamics are coupled is challenging because the effects of faults and attacks in one sub-system can propagate to other sub-systems and lead to safety violations. In this paper, we study the problem of safety-critical control for CPS with coupled dynamics when some sub-systems are subject to failure or attack. We first propose resilient-safety indices (RSIs) for the faulty or compromised sub-systems that bound the worst-case impacts of faulty or compromised sub-systems on a set of specified safety constraints. By incorporating the RSIs, we provide a sufficient condition for the synthesis of control policies in each failure- and attack- free sub-systems. The synthesized control policies compensate for the impacts of the faulty or compromised sub-systems to guarantee safety. We formulate sum-of-square optimization programs to compute the RSIs and the safety-ensuring control policies. We present a case study that applies our proposed approach on the temperature regulation of three coupled rooms. The case study demonstrates that control policies obtained using our algorithm guarantee system's safety constraints.

eess.SY↗

An Analytical Framework for Control Synthesis of Cyber-Physical Systems with Safety Guarantee

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are required to operate safely under fault and malicious attacks. The simplex architecture and the recently proposed cyber resilient architectures, e.g., Byzantine fault tolerant++ (BFT++), provide safety for CPS under faults and malicious cyber attacks, respectively. However, these existing architectures make use of different timing parameters and implementations to provide safety, and are seemingly unrelated. In this paper, we propose an analytical framework to represent the simplex, BFT++ and other practical cyber resilient architectures (CRAs). We construct a hybrid system that models CPS adopting any of these architectures. We derive sufficient conditions via our proposed framework under which a control policy is guaranteed to be safe. We present an algorithm to synthesize the control policy. We validate the proposed framework using a case study on lateral control of a Boeing 747, and demonstrate that our proposed approach ensures safety of the system.

eess.SY↗

Privacy-Preserving Reinforcement Learning Beyond Expectation

Cyber and cyber-physical systems equipped with machine learning algorithms such as autonomous cars share environments with humans. In such a setting, it is important to align system (or agent) behaviors with the preferences of one or more human users. We consider the case when an agent has to learn behaviors in an unknown environment. Our goal is to capture two defining characteristics of humans: i) a tendency to assess and quantify risk, and ii) a desire to keep decision making hidden from external parties. We incorporate cumulative prospect theory (CPT) into the objective of a reinforcement learning (RL) problem for the former. For the latter, we use differential privacy. We design an algorithm to enable an RL agent to learn policies to maximize a CPT-based objective in a privacy-preserving manner and establish guarantees on the privacy of value functions learned by the algorithm when rewards are sufficiently close. This is accomplished through adding a calibrated noise using a Gaussian process mechanism at each step. Through empirical evaluations, we highlight a privacy-utility tradeoff and demonstrate that the RL agent is able to learn behaviors that are aligned with that of a human user in the same environment in a privacy-preserving manner

cs.LG↗