Bharat Bhargava is a professor of the Department of Computer Science with a courtesy appointment in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Professor Bhargava is conducting research in security and privacy issues in distributed systems. This involves host authentication and key management, secure routing and dealing with malicious hosts, adaptability to attacks, and experimental studies. Related research is in formalizing evidence, trust, and fraud. Applications in e-commerce and transportation security are being tested in a prototype system. Based on his research in reliability, he is studying vulnerabilities in systems to assess threats to large organizations. He has developed techniques to avoid threats that can lead to operational failures.
The research has direct impact on nuclear waste transport, bio-security, disaster management, and homeland security. These ideas and scientific principles are being applied to the building of peer-to- peer systems, cellular assisted mobile ad hoc networks, and to the monitoring of QoS-enabled network domains.
In the 1988 IEEE Data Engineering Conference, he and John Riedl received the best paper award for their work on “A Model for Adaptable Systems for Transaction Processing.” Professor Bhargava is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers. He has been awarded the charter Gold Core Member distinction by the IEEE Computer Society for his distinguished service. He received Outstanding Instructor Awards from the Purdue chapter of the ACM in 1996 and 1998. He has graduated the largest number of Ph.D students in CS department and is active in supporting/mentoring minority students. In 2003, he was inducted in the Purdue’s Book of Great Teachers. He serves on seven editorial boards of international journals. He also serves the IEEE Computer Society on Technical Achievement award and Fellow committees. Professor Bhargava is the founder of the IEEE Symposium on Reliable and Distributed Systems, IEEE conference on Digital Library, and the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.
