Electrical engineering grad student wins award in international poster contest

8/17/2021

By Sarah Small

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Kaustav Chatterjee, a third-year electrical engineering doctoral student at Penn State, received second place in the graduate student poster contest at the 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power and Energy Society (IEEE PES) general meeting, held virtually from July 26-29.

The IEEE PES is the largest group for sharing developments in power and energy related fields, according to its website. Chatterjee’s poster was selected for its “interesting and relevant work” and because he “explained clearly the problem and the proposed solution with illustrative figures and pointed to the right references for more details,” according to the selection committee’s feedback.

“Kaustav is one of my top students,” said Nilanjan Ray Chaudhuri, associate professor of electrical engineering and Chatterjee’s adviser. “This being our flagship conference, his achievement makes me proud.”

The research displayed on the poster focuses on data anomaly detection and correction for the operation of large power grids. According to Chatterjee, bad data could originate from low-quality measurements, missing data samples, spurious outliers or cyber-attacks on sensors and communication infrastructure.

“Our contributions are twofold: first, we propose an unsupervised machine-learning method for the identification and classification of data anomalies in power system phasor measurements, and second, we present a real-time algorithm for true data recovery using low-rank matrix completion,” he said. “One important attribute of our work is that it can make a distinction between bad data outliers and the outliers induced by system events like faults and outages.”

Chatterjee received a master of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India, in 2018, and a bachelor of engineering degree from Jadavpur University, India, in 2015, both in electrical engineering. His research interests lie in the intersection of signal processing and system theory for real-time monitoring of large power systems and online estimation of system dynamics. Presently, he is also working as a student employee with the Electric Power Research Institute.

 

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Kaustav Chatterjee, a third-year electrical engineering doctoral student at Penn State and recipient of the second place award in the graduate student poster contest at the 2021 IEEE PES general meeting. IMAGE: PENN STATE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING