Kishor S. Trivedi

A leading international expert in reliability and performability evaluation of dependable systems, Trivedi has made seminal contributions to stochastic modeling formalisms and their efficient solution. He has held the Hudson Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, serving as head of Duke High Availability Assurance Laboratory (DHAAL) in the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. School of Engineering. Trivedi joined the Duke faculty in 1975. He received his B.S.E.E. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (India) in 1968, his M.S. degree in 1972, and his Ph.D. in 1974, both from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He is known as a leading international expert in the domain of reliability and performability evaluation of dependable systems, and made seminal contributions to stochastic modeling formalisms and their efficient solution. He carried out experimental research in software reliability during operation, researching software fault tolerance through environmental diversity. This work, including software bug classification, empirical study of real failure data, and associated theory of affordable software fault tolerance, gained significant attention.

Trivedi made key contributions to his field in many ways. He encapsulated developed algorithms into usable and well-circulated software packages and applied research results to practical problems, working directly with industry. This work not only solved difficult real-life problems but also produced new research based on those problems. He published over 500 articles, supervised 45 Ph.D. dissertations, and mentored more than 30 postdoctoral associates.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society. Trivedi has served on many editorial boards and conference committees and was the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 2008 Technical Achievement Award, "For pioneering contributions to the understanding of the phenomena of software aging and software rejuvenation." He appeared on ISI's highly cited list with an h-index of 82 and received grants from governmental agencies including NASA, NATO, NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, ARO, NIH, NSWC, ONR, and RADC.

He also helped several high-profile companies carry out reliability/availability prediction of their products under design or in existence, including 3Com, Avaya, Boeing, Cisco, DEC, EMC, GE, HP, Huawei, IBM, Lucent, NEC, TCS, Union Switch and Signals, and Wipro. Most notable among these was his help in reliability modeling of the current return network subsystem of the Boeing 787 for FAA certification. The algorithm Trivedi developed for this problem was jointly patented by him and Boeing. He also led the reliability/availability modeling of SIP on IBM WebSphere, a model that was responsible for the sale of the system by IBM to AT&T.

Trivedi wrote several influential books, including textbooks. He is the author of a well-known text entitled Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queuing and Computer Science Applications, originally published by Prentice-Hall; a thoroughly revised second edition, including its Indian edition, was published by John Wiley. He published two books titled Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Queueing Networks and Markov Chains, John Wiley, with a second edition published in 2006. He also completed a new book on Reliability and Availability Engineering for Cambridge University Press, and edited two additional volumes: Advanced Computer System Design, published by Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, and Performability Modeling Tools and Techniques, published by John Wiley & Sons.

He is the author or co-author of several notable publications, including: with Mondal, S.K., Yin, X., Muppala, J.K., and Alonso Lopez, Defects per Million Computation in Service-Oriented Environments, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, vol. 8, no. 1 (2015), pp. 32–46 [10.1109/TSC.2013.52]; with Yin, X., Ma, X., and Vinel, A., Performance and Reliability Evaluation of BSM Broadcasting in DSRC with Multi-Channel Schemes, IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 63, no. 12 (2014), pp. 3101–3113 [10.1109/TC.2013.175]; with Sebastio, S., Wang, D., and Yin, X., Fast computation of bounds for two-terminal network reliability, European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 238, no. 3 (2014), pp. 810–823 [10.1016/j.ejor.2014.04.035]; with Ghosh, R., Longo, F., Xia, R., and Naik, V.K., Stochastic Model Driven Capacity Planning for an Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, vol. 7, no. 4 (2014), pp. 667–680 [10.1109/TSC.2013.44]; and with Xia, R., Yin, X., Alonso Lopez, J., and Machida, F., Performance and Availability Modeling of IT Systems with Data Backup and Restore, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol. 11, no. 4 (2014), pp. 375–389 [10.1109/TDSC.2013.50].