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Joydeep Mitra

Publications and source records attributed to Joydeep Mitra.

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Real-Time Edge-based Detection of Correlated AI Data-Center Load Episodes

Artificial-intelligence data centers running bulk-synchronous training can impose sub-second power swings. When several facilities synchronize their training cycles, these load variations become spatially correlated and amplify the aggregate disturbance on the grid. A grid operator without access to data-center telemetry must infer this correlation from electrical measurements alone. However, the required observation time and the feasibility of detection on substation-deployable hardware remain uncharacterized. This paper develops a correlation-based detection method to classify the multi-facility operating regime from cross-facility power measurements. Analytical derivations and experimental validation show that the resulting detection confidence increases with the observation-window length at a rate governed by the load correlation time. The method is demonstrated in a real-time hardware-in-the-loop testbed, where load setpoints generated from a validated semi-Markov data-center load model are applied to an electromagnetic-transient grid simulation on a Real-Time Digital Simulator. A compact classifier built on pairwise power correlations runs on an edge device in this loop and determines whether the data-center load variations are independent or spatially correlated. The cross-facility correlation separates the independent and correlated cases across independent realizations. The held-out detection accuracy improves with the observation window, consistent with the predicted relation. A raw-waveform network fails to generalize, supporting pairwise correlation as the discriminative signal. The detector executes in real time on commodity edge hardware. A closed-loop demonstration against the running simulator tracks a regime change within one observation window.

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A Hierarchical Semi-Markov Load Model for AI Data Centers Coupling Job Scheduling with Bulk-Synchronous-Parallel Power Dynamics

AI data centers are emerging as a dominant new load class with their power dynamics fundamentally from conventional industrial loads. Inside a training job, the bulk-synchronous-parallel algorithm moves each node through compute, sync, and checkpoint steps, which swings power between full load and near idle within seconds. Across the whole facility, jobs arrive, take blocks of nodes for hours to days, then leave, so the number of busy nodes changes daily, weekly, and yearly. This slower shift drives facility-wide swings and the peak demand that sets the size of the grid link. A model that looks only at within-job behavior, and treats the facility as a fixed set of busy nodes, smooths out these swings and misses the true peak-to-average ratio. This paper develops a hierarchical semi-Markov Data-Center (HSM-DC) load model that couples two layers across two timescales. A job-scheduling layer creates jobs through a non-homogeneous compound-Poisson process shaped by daily, weekly, and seasonal patterns, gives each job a heavy-tailed node count and length, and places jobs on a fixed pool of nodes on a first-come basis. A within-job layer moves each busy node through a five-state semi-Markov chain for the BSP steps, with state-based Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise. Facility power comes from this changing node count and the per-node power, set to match measured node data and the facility's straight-line power-versus-load curve. Configured to the reference facility at the same scale, the model matches mean power, its spread, and the peak-to-average ratio across load levels, with fit scores of 0.9997, 0.92, and 0.82. It also matches the share of queued jobs to within one point at high load. Facility-wide swings and peak demand come from how jobs arrive and get scheduled, so grid planning must model that process, not just scale up a single node's power curve.

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Large-Load Demand Flexibility as Virtual Storage

Water electrolysis plants, hyperscale data centers, and aluminum potlines represent gigawatts of demand-side flexibility for bulk power system balancing, operational planning, and procurement services. Such loads are scheduled through per-interval power bounds and horizon energy windows, whereas co-located battery energy storage systems (BESS) operate under state-of-charge dynamics. The two formulations share no common mathematical structure, and the joint procurement value of co-located loads and storage goes unrealized as a result. This paper establishes the connection between the two formulations through a virtual storage (VS) equivalence. Every feasible large-load trajectory under power-bound and energy-window constraints is a valid charge trajectory of a VS device that operates at unity accounting efficiency in the grid power balance. Production and service-level costs lie outside this abstraction and enter the dispatch through curtailment opportunity costs. For a portfolio co-located with a BESS, aggregation reduces the constraint count from O(NT) to O(T) and yields a co-dispatch price for both resources. Validation on the IEEE RTS-GMLC with three representative load classes shows that virtual storage delivers the dominant share of joint procurement savings. In the tested case, savings are additive because the two resources dispatch to non-overlapping intervals, and the curtailment shadow price tracks the peak-price band onset rather than the daily peak price.

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Storage as a Transmission Asset (SATA) for Large-Load Congestion Relief

Hyperscale data centers and other large concentrated loads can impose substantial new demand on existing transmission networks. If import corridors lack sufficient transfer capability, operators may need to curtail load, delay interconnection, or reinforce the network to maintain reliable service. An energy storage system (ESS) deployed as a storage-as-transmission asset (SATA) offers a non-wires alternative by providing operator-directed support to constrained import corridors. However, the operating-level reliability value of SATA dispatch remains insufficiently quantified. This paper evaluates operator-directed SATA using a day-ahead DC optimal power flow that co-optimizes generation, ESS dispatch, and load curtailment across Monte Carlo scenarios of demand and generator availability. Operating reliability is assessed using expected energy not served (EENS), loss-of-load hours (LOLH), and the conditional value at risk (CVaR) of daily unserved energy. Congestion-price and flow-sensitivity metrics are used to identify the limiting corridor and storage location. The interconnection is then screened to determine whether SATA is suitable, reinforcement is required, or storage would provide little transmission value. Results show that operator-directed SATA reduces average unserved energy, loss-of-load exposure, and tail risk compared with deploying the same ESS for pure arbitrage. These results demonstrate that the operating designation of storage is a primary driver of its transmission value.

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Two-Stage Optimization for Dynamic Line Rating and Energy Storage Deployment

The increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DER) and weather-driven variability has intensified congestion and reliability stress in transmission networks. Strategies that enhance the utilization of existing infrastructure, such as static line ratings (SLR) and energy storage systems (ESS), have therefore become necessary. SLRs rely on conservative ambient assumptions and often understate thermal limits, whereas dynamic line ratings (DLR) adjust capacity according to weather conditions and unlock additional transfer capability. Energy storage systems provide temporal flexibility, but their transmission-level effectiveness depends on proper siting and sizing. This paper proposes a two-stage optimization method for joint placement of DLR installations and utility-scale energy storage. In the first stage, a mixed-integer linear program selects DLR corridors and ESS buses by minimizing operating cost, DER curtailment, and load-shedding penalties subject to DC power flow and investment constraints. In the second stage, the model determines ESS energy capacity and operating schedules under ambient-driven line ratings. Ambient weather data is used to generate DLR profiles, and sequential Monte Carlo simulation is applied to assess system adequacy. The proposed method, when deployed on the modified IEEE RTS 24-bus system, shows that coordinated DLR and ESS planning improves transmission capability, mitigates congestion, and strengthens system adequacy under weather variability.

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A Pre-Dispatch Resonance Safety Criterion for AI Training Clusters

Hyperscale AI training clusters operate under the Bulk Synchronous Parallel protocol, which impose a periodic power swing on the transmission grid. Every GPU in the job transitions between compute and idle in lockstep, so the aggregate power traces a square wave at the training iteration period. Production iteration periods of one to ten seconds place the forcing frequency within the inter-area electromechanical mode band of large interconnections, where a training schedule can drive a mode at resonance. This paper derives a closed-form pre-dispatch safety criterion that bounds the maximum cluster size a grid can absorb at any proposed iteration period. The derivation inverts the steady-state forced two-area swing equations. The criterion defines a danger band of iteration periods, extends to the square-wave harmonics, and parameterizes the modal response from planning-study eigenanalysis and the forcing amplitude from GPU specifications. Applied to the IEEE 39-bus system at a production-representative duty cycle, the criterion shows that the maximum safe cluster at resonance is $66\,900$ GPUs under light damping. Rescheduling the same job less than one second away from resonance reduces the deviation $7.4\times$ with no hardware change. These results establish the training iteration period as a controllable grid-safety parameter and supply the analytic screening tool that reliability directives on current large loads lack.

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Modal Analysis of Spatial Load Correlation in AI Data Center-Dominated Power Systems

Hyperscale AI data centers induce spatially and temporally correlated load fluctuations that violate classical independence assumptions and are not captured by time-averaged spectral methods. These correlations are episodic and non-stationary, so they demand analysis that resolves transient structure. This paper applies Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) to the temporal evolution of pairwise inter-bus correlation coefficients and forms a low-dimensional state representation that enables modal analysis without a stationarity assumption. The recovered modes distinguish sustained coherence, decaying transients, and intensifying events, and their oscillation timescales map to underlying physical coupling mechanisms. The method is evaluated on an IEEE 39-bus Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) testbed with three converter-interfaced AI data center loads driven by synthetic workload profiles. A global analysis attributes the dominant correlation energy to a slow thermal band, and a sliding-window analysis identifies brief intensification events in a small fraction of windows that align with stochastic workload coincidences. Cross-validation with RTDS voltage coherence confirms elevated coupling during these intervals. The proposed modal growth indicator provides an early-warning signal of correlation intensification, with a lead of of about 4~s before pairwise coherence reaches its peak.

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Spatial Load Correlation in AI Data-Center-Dominated Power Systems

The proliferation of large-scale data centers introduces spatially correlated demand profiles that challenge the long-standing assumption of statistical independence of loads in power system analysis. This paper examines the emergence of such load correlations and evaluates their impact on data-center-dominated grids. Analytical derivations reveal that correlated load fluctuations amplify aggregate stochastic disturbances, reduce voltage stability margins through weakened reactive power stiffness, and degrade frequency stability margin by erosion of natural load diversity effects. Real-time digital simulation studies confirm that moderate spatial correlation in distributed data centers produces simultaneous frequency deviations and voltage fluctuations across multiple buses. The findings offer transmission system operators a physics-based perspective to interpret emerging oscillatory phenomena and establish stability planning criteria grounded in measurable load-correlation structures rather than traditional diversity assumptions.

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A Security & Privacy Analysis of US-based Contact Tracing Apps

With the onset of COVID-19, governments worldwide planned to develop and deploy contact tracing (CT) apps to help speed up the contact tracing process. However, experts raised concerns about the long-term privacy and security implications of using these apps. Consequently, several proposals were made to design privacy-preserving CT apps. To this end, Google and Apple developed the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework to help public health authorities develop privacy-preserving CT apps. In the United States, 26 states used the GAEN framework to develop their CT apps. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the US-based GAEN apps to determine 1) the privileges they have, 2) if the apps comply with their defined privacy policies, and 3) if they contain known vulnerabilities that can be exploited to compromise privacy. The results show that all apps violate their stated privacy policy and contain several known vulnerabilities.

cs.CR

Automatic Routability Predictor Development Using Neural Architecture Search

The rise of machine learning technology inspires a boom of its applications in electronic design automation (EDA) and helps improve the degree of automation in chip designs. However, manually crafted machine learning models require extensive human expertise and tremendous engineering efforts. In this work, we leverage neural architecture search (NAS) to automate the development of high-quality neural architectures for routability prediction, which can help to guide cell placement toward routable solutions. Our search method supports various operations and highly flexible connections, leading to architectures significantly different from all previous human-crafted models. Experimental results on a large dataset demonstrate that our automatically generated neural architectures clearly outperform multiple representative manually crafted solutions. Compared to the best case of manually crafted models, NAS-generated models achieve 5.85% higher Kendall's $τ$ in predicting the number of nets with DRC violations and 2.12% better area under ROC curve (ROC-AUC) in DRC hotspot detection. Moreover, compared with human-crafted models, which easily take weeks to develop, our efficient NAS approach finishes the whole automatic search process with only 0.3 days.

cs.LG

A Sensitivity-based Approach for Optimal Siting of Distributed Energy Resources

This paper presents a sensitivity-based approach for the placement of distributed energy resources (DERs) in power systems. The approach is based on the fact that most planning studies utilize some form of optimization, and solutions to these optimization problems provide insights into the sensitivity of many system variables to operating conditions and constraints. However, most of the existing sensitivity-based planning criteria do not capture ranges of effectiveness of these solutions (i.e., ranges of the effectiveness of Lagrange multipliers). The proposed method detects the ranges of the effectiveness of Lagrange multipliers and uses them to determine optimal solution alternatives. Profiles for existing generation and loads, and transmission constraints are taken into consideration. The proposed method is used to determine the impacts of DERs at different locations, in the presence of a stochastic element (load variability). This method consists of sequentially calculating Lagrange multipliers of the dual solution of the optimization problem for various load buses for all load scenarios. Optimal sizes and sites of resources are jointly determined in a sequential manner based on the validity of active constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through several case studies on various test systems including the IEEE reliability test system (IEEE RTS), the IEEE 14, and 30 bus systems. In comparison with conventional sensitivity-based approaches (i.e., without considering ranges of validity of Lagrange multipliers), the proposed approach provides more accurate results for active constraints.

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SeMA: Extending and Analyzing Storyboards to Develop Secure Android Apps

Mobile apps provide various critical services, such as banking, communication, and healthcare. To this end, they have access to our personal information and have the ability to perform actions on our behalf. Hence, securing mobile apps is crucial to ensuring the privacy and safety of its users. Recent research efforts have focused on developing solutions to secure mobile ecosystems (i.e., app platforms, apps, and app stores), specifically in the context of detecting vulnerabilities in Android apps. Despite this attention, known vulnerabilities are often found in mobile apps, which can be exploited by malicious apps to harm the user. Further, fixing vulnerabilities after developing an app has downsides in terms of time, resources, user inconvenience, and information loss. In an attempt to address this concern, we have developed SeMA, a mobile app development methodology that builds on existing mobile app design artifacts such as storyboards. With SeMA, security is a first-class citizen in an app's design -- app designers and developers can collaborate to specify and reason about the security properties of an app at an abstract level without being distracted by implementation level details. Our realization of SeMA using Android Studio tooling demonstrates the methodology is complementary to existing design and development practices. An evaluation of the effectiveness of SeMA shows the methodology can detect and help prevent 49 vulnerabilities known to occur in Android apps. Further, a usability study of the methodology involving ten real-world developers shows the methodology is likely to reduce the development time and help developers uncover and prevent known vulnerabilities while designing apps.

cs.SE

SeMA: A Design Methodology for Building Secure Android Apps

UX (user experience) designers visually capture the UX of an app via storyboards. This method is also used in Android app development to conceptualize and design apps. Recently, security has become an integral part of Android app UX because mobile apps are used to perform critical activities such as banking, communication, and health. Therefore, securing user information is imperative in mobile apps. In this context, storyboarding tools offer limited capabilities to capture and reason about security requirements of an app. Consequently, security cannot be baked into the app at design time. Hence, vulnerabilities stemming from design flaws can often occur in apps. To address this concern, in this paper, we propose a storyboard based design methodology to enable the specification and verification of security properties of an Android app at design time.

cs.SE

BenchPress: Analyzing Android App Vulnerability Benchmark Suites

In recent years, various benchmark suites have been developed to evaluate the efficacy of Android security analysis tools. The choice of such benchmark suites used in tool evaluations is often based on the availability and popularity of suites and not on their characteristics and relevance. One of the reasons for such choices is the lack of information about the characteristics and relevance of benchmarks suites. In this context, we empirically evaluated four Android specific benchmark suites: DroidBench, Ghera, IccBench, and UBCBench. For each benchmark suite, we identified the APIs used by the suite that were discussed on Stack Overflow in the context of Android app development and measured the usage of these APIs in a sample of 227K real world apps (coverage). We also compared each pair of benchmark suites to identify the differences between them in terms of API usage. Finally, we identified security-related APIs used in real-world apps but not in any of the above benchmark suites to assess the opportunities to extend benchmark suites (gaps). The findings in this paper can help 1) Android security analysis tool developers choose benchmark suites that are best suited to evaluate their tools (informed by coverage and pairwise comparison) and 2) Android app vulnerability benchmark creators develop and extend benchmark suites (informed by gaps).

cs.SE

Are Free Android App Security Analysis Tools Effective in Detecting Known Vulnerabilities?

Increasing interest in securing the Android ecosystem has spawned numerous efforts to assist app developers in building secure apps. These efforts have resulted in tools and techniques capable of detecting vulnerabilities (and malicious behaviors) in apps. However, there has been no evaluation of the effectiveness of these tools and techniques in detecting known vulnerabilities. The absence of such evaluations puts app developers at a disadvantage when choosing security analysis tools to secure their apps. In this regard, we evaluated the effectiveness of vulnerability detection tools for Android apps. We reviewed 64 tools and empirically evaluated 14 vulnerability detection tools (incidentally along with five malicious behavior detection tools) against 42 known unique vulnerabilities captured by Ghera benchmarks, which are composed of both vulnerable and secure apps. Of the 24 observations from the evaluation, the main observation is existing vulnerability detection tools for Android apps are very limited in their ability to detect known vulnerabilities -- all of the evaluated tools together could only detect 30 of the 42 known unique vulnerabilities. More effort is required if security analysis tools are to help developers build secure apps. We hope the observations from this evaluation will help app developers choose appropriate security analysis tools and persuade tool developers and researchers to identify and address limitations in their tools and techniques. We also hope this evaluation will catalyze or spark a conversation in the software engineering and security communities to require a more rigorous and explicit evaluation of security analysis tools and techniques.

cs.CR

Ghera: A Repository of Android App Vulnerability Benchmarks

Security of mobile apps affects the security of their users. This has fueled the development of techniques to automatically detect vulnerabilities in mobile apps and help developers secure their apps; specifically, in the context of Android platform due to openness and ubiquitousness of the platform. Despite a slew of research efforts in this space, there is no comprehensive repository of up-to-date and lean benchmarks that contain most of the known Android app vulnerabilities and, consequently, can be used to rigorously evaluate both existing and new vulnerability detection techniques and help developers learn about Android app vulnerabilities. In this paper, we describe Ghera, an open source repository of benchmarks that capture 25 known vulnerabilities in Android apps (as pairs of exploited/benign and exploiting/malicious apps). We also present desirable characteristics of vulnerability benchmarks and repositories that we uncovered while creating Ghera.

cs.CR