My Computer Science & Engineering Department

Some of our students attended the Kaspersky Hackathon which was hosted by Clemson in September 8. USC had 2 teams who took 2nd and 3rd place. Excellent work! Clay and Ronni were the trainers for the team. If you are interested, drop by the CyberSecurity@USC group.

Dr. Lannan (Lisa) Luo has received an NSF award for her project "Enabling Precise and Automated Insecurity Analysis of Middleware on Mobile Platforms" which studies ways to improve the security of mobile platforms, like Android phones. From the abstract:

This project will develop new architectural designs, algorithms and techniques for precise and automated insecurity analysis of MoMP. To make the research concrete, demonstrations will be created for the Android Framework for mobile smartphones, tablets and IoT devices, and the first platform for precise and automated insecurity analysis of Android Framework will be built, combining current software analysis techniques, such as symbolic execution, hybrid dynamic/static analysis, and cross-process and cross-layer software analysis, to make them capable of analyzing complex and large-sized MoMP like Android Framework. The platform will be evaluated and applied to discovering various types of zero-day vulnerabilities and generating proof-of-concept exploits.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Qiang Zeng to the department. He received his PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from Penn State University and most recently was an Assistant Professor at Temple University. His main research interest is Software and Systems Security, with a focus on Internet of Things and Mobile Computing. He also works on the security aspect of machine learning. He is currently teaching CSCE 311 and is looking for students interested in Cybersecurity.

We are are happy to welcome Dr. Sanjib Sur to the Department. Dr. Sur received his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research interests are in the areas of Wireless Systems and Architectures, Millimeter-wave Communications and Networks, Internet of Things Connectivity and Sensing Systems. He is currently teaching a class on Millimeter-Wave Networking and Applications and is looking for students to join his research group.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Pooyan Jamshidi to the Department. Dr. Jamshidi received his PhD in Computing at Dublin City University in Ireland and most recently was a Postdoctoral Associate at Carnegie Mellon University. His research goal is to advance a scientific, principled understanding of machine learning systems. He is teaching Machine Learning Systems this semester. You can visit his website to learn more about his research.

We are proud to announce that Eduardo Romero has been awarded a GEM National Consortium Fellowship. The GEM program seeks to enhance the value of the nation’s human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. The fellowship, in conjunction with the GEM graduate institution and GEM employer, provides a stipend, full tuition and fees, and a paid summer internship.

Dr. Bakos has received a research award from the DOE for his joint work with Florida State University on "Electric Ship Research and Development."

We are proud to announce the following two ASPIRE award winners:

• Dr. Lisa Luo for her research on "Vulnerability Discovery and Test Input Generation for Android System Services".
• Dr. Greg Gay for his project "Investigating the Relationship between Real and Synthetic Software Faults".

Dr. Yonghong Yan has secured a research award from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/DOE for his work on "Connecting ROSE to LLVM OpenMP Runtime".

Dr. Bakos has received a research grant from the Savannah River National Laboratory/DOE for work on "Data Analysis, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning for Plutonium Canister Corrosion Surveillance".