Speaker
Malka N. Halgamuge
Senior Lecturer in Cybersecurity at RMIT University
Melbourne, Australia
Title: Securing Microgrids from Cyber-Physical Threats Through Distributed Trust and Reputation Management
Abstract:
Microgrids integrating renewable energy sources face significant cyber-physical security challenges due to their decentralised nature and vulnerability to attacks. This keynote presents a novel distributed trust and reputation management framework tailored for cyber-physical secure microgrid operation. The framework incorporates dynamic communication topologies, heterogeneous distributed generator dynamics, and intermittent renewable energy sources, providing a realistic representation of practical microgrids. It introduces penalty factors and enhanced reputation scoring mechanisms to mitigate the influence of malicious nodes. The distributed approach enables decentralised trust evaluation, enhancing resilience against single points of failure. An optimisation framework determines optimal control inputs for distributed generators, considering trust and reputation scores to isolate compromised entities while ensuring stable operation.
Speaker’s Biography:
Dr Malka N. Halgamuge is a Senior Lecturer in Cybersecurity at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the Chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Victorian Section. From 2007-2021, Malka worked as a Researcher at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. She obtained her PhD in the same department. She was awarded prestigious fellowships to work at the University of California, Los Angeles, Lund University, Sweden, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, among others. Malka was the Keynote Speaker, Plenary Speaker, Associate Editor, Editorial Board Member, and IEEE Senior Member. She was the Program Co-Chair, Track Chair, Publication Chair, Advisory Chair, Publicity Co-Chair, Session Chair, Guest Editor, and a Member of the TPC for 300 international conferences. She has presented 69 invited/guest lectures in academia (e.g., Oxford University, Ohio State University), industry (e.g., IBM, KPMG East Africa, AISA), and at 9 IEEE sections. Malka has conducted 18 media interviews, articles, radio interviews, and TV interviews (ABC News). She is passionate about research in IoTs, Data Communications, Cyber Security, Blockchain, Machine & Deep Learning, and security in Large Language Models. She has co-supervised 4 PhD students to completion at the University of Melbourne and currently supervises 5 PhD students at RMIT University as the principal supervisor. Malka has been a chief investigator for multiple grants totalling over $1 million and has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and conference proceedings.