Professors Tian Lan and Guru Venkatamarani win the 2017 Hegarty Award for Faculty Innovation. This was the third year of this award. It was created by Aran Hegarty and his wife Fritz. Aran is a SEAS alumnus (MS, 1997) and has been a NAC member since 2011. The award, which is $10,000, is to recognize and reward a faculty member (or faculty members) for innovation. The selection committee met on Thursday October 5th.
A quote from the nomination: “Through interdisciplinary collaboration on cybersecurity projects (which have received substantial funding in the past few years from NSF, ONR, and DARPA), Profs. Lan and Venkataramani have invented the first Intelligence‐driven Solution for Rapid Cyber Defense (Rapid‐ID). In the recent Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2017), they demonstrated that for software systems at scale, Rapid‐ID can swiftly generate threat intelligence and optimize counter‐actions at a speed that is at least three orders of magnitude faster than the state‐of‐the‐art. This revolutionary solution has attracted interest from both companies and government labs, such as GrammaTech, Bell Labs, AT&T, ONR, SRC, and Qualcomm Research. Three patents are filed or currently under submission. Recently, ONR has awarded a $1.5 million grant (ONR Award #40144) for the PIs to utilize Rapid‐ID to improve security and efficiency of Navy and Marine Corps systems and software”.
