Category: News

Prof. Guru Venkataramani's work on hardware security, with Prof. Milos Doroslovacki and graduate student Fan Yao, will be presented at IEEE HPCA 2018 in Vienna, Austria, at the end of February 2018. The work highlights the vulnerabilities exposed by cache coherence protocols to information leakage, and discusses methods to stop such attacks. With the growing buzz about Meltdown and Spectre that expose hardware vulnerabilities, this study is significant since cache coherence protocols are a feature in almost every modern multi-core processor from cell phones to supercomputers. Watch the short video to learn more!

Six LINC students won cash prizes at the 12th Annual SEAS Student Research & Development Showcase on Wednesday, February 21st. For a complete list of the winners please visit the SEAS R&D Showcase winners page.

Graduate Student Experimental Research
2nd Place ($4,000):
Fan Yao, Yongbo Li, Yurong Chen, and Hongfa Xue
Title: “StatSym: Vulnerable Path Discovery through Statistics-Guided Symbolic Execution”
Advisors: Suresh Subramaniam and Tian Lan

Runner-up tie ($1,000 each):
Sultan Alamro and Maotong Xu
Title: “Shed: Optimal Dynamic Cloning to Meet Application Deadlines in Cloud”
Advisors: Suresh Subramaniam and Tian Lan

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam has been selected as an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2018 and 2019.  As an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, he is expected to deliver several lectures on tour on behalf the IEEE on topics of his research interest.  His current interests are elastic optical networking, data center networking, and cloud computing.

Each department chair was asked to nominate one faculty member who had had an exceptional year in teaching, in research or in service, or some combination thereof.  The nominations were reviewed by a committee of four persons. They were Professor Can Korman, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, NAC member and SEAS alumnus Gulu Gambhir (VP and CTO of the Technology Services Sector, Northrop Grumman), NAC member and SEAS alumnus Anirudh Kulkarni (founder and CEO of Customer Value Partners) and SEAS alums Karl and Vicki Gumtow (co-founders of CyberPoint International).

Three faculty are recipients of the faculty recognition award. They are: 1) James Hahn (CS), 2) Megan Leftwich (MAE) and 3) Tian Lan (ECE). Each recipient receives $7500.

Professor Tian Lan had an outstanding year in research in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and IoT. He received $1.7M in funding from ONR and NSF, and published 17 peer-reviewed articles in his field’s top conferences and journals, including INFOCOM, SIGMETRICS, ICDCS, DSN, CLOUD, Globecom, Transactions on Networking, Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Transactions on Network and Service Management, and Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. Professor Lan is a co-winner of the 2017 Hegarty Innovation Award for his work on cybersecurity. He also provides outstanding student mentorship – he advises 4 doctoral students and has graduated one student who is placed at AT&T Labs.

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”.

Prof. Guru Venkataramani and Prof. Suresh Subramaniam recently received $499k in funding from NSF's CSR Core program for their project titled, "A server-network cooperative approach to data center energy optimization". The project investigates mechanisms to improve energy efficiency in data centers through a holistic understanding of data center servers and networks, and by leveraging the power optimizing features (such as sleep states and link rate adaptation mechanisms) present in them. Further, the project will explore the impact of heterogeneous processor hardware and emerging network paradigms, and their roles in improving energy efficiency in future data centers.  The performance period is from 09/'17 through 08/'20.

Profs. Tian Lan and Guru Venkataramani have received a 4-year, $1.47M grant from the Office of Naval Research, titled “DIALECT: Communication Protocols Customization via Feature DIAgnosis, Lacing, Elimination, Cross-grafting, and Trimming”. The project will investigate how to individualize security in cyber systems by customizing their protocols. In contrast to the currently adopted “protocol standards", this first-of-a-kind approach is motivated by the fact that unnecessary code/layer often introduced by standards may eventually be used as backdoors for security exploits, while protocol customization enables feature debloat and can significantly eliminate the risks associated with monoculture cyber systems. The project will also explore "tech push" opportunities in collaboration with naval labs.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam, the department chair, has received the 2017 Distinguished Researcher Award from the the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the George Washington University. The award recognizes his significant research accomplishments, and was presented to him at a ceremony on May 4, 2017.

Prof. Subramaniam is an internationally-recognized researcher and scholar in optical networking. He has made numerous high-impact and pioneering contributions to optical network architectures, algorithms, and performance modeling. He joined GW in 1997 after obtaining his PhD degree from the University of Washington in Electrical Engineering, and has had two sabbatical stints, one each at the University of Maryland and at MIT. He has published around 175 peer-reviewed papers in top venues, and has received two best paper awards and a best paper award nomination, besides co-editing 3 books on optical networking. His papers have had significant impact as evidenced by the number of times they have been cited (around 4800 times, with his top 5 pieces of work garnering almost 2000 citations). His research has been sponsored by NSF, DARPA, NIST, and NSA. Prof. Subramaniam is also active in professional service,and has frequently been invited to serve in leading roles in conferences and journals. He has served on the editorial boards of seven journals including for a full 6-year term on the board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and on the board of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. He has chaired several conferences including three leading IEEE conferences in his field, namely, INFOCOM, ICC, and Globecom. He served a two-year term as elected Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Optical Networking Technical Committee in 2012 and 2013. For his research contributions to optical networking, he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow in 2015.

This year, three separate competitions were held throughout the day: The R&D Showcase, the Entrepreneurship Prize competition, and the new SEAS Innovation Challenge. SEAS Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies organized the event with strong support from SEAS staff. Students presented their posters, research, and innovations and vied for $54,000 in prize money.

LINC Student 2017 SEAS Student R&D Showcase Winners

• Best Theoretical Poster - 2nd Place ($4,000) - Jingxin Wu & Maotong Xu, ECE graduate student for “Routing, fiber, band, and spectrum assignment (RFBSA) for multi-granular elastic optical networks” mentored by Prof. Suresh Subramaniam

For information on the SEAS R&D Showcase visit SEAS’ website.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam recently served on the organizing committee of IEEE Globecom and was a TPC co-chair of the Optical Networks and Systems symposium. Globecom was held December 4-8 in Washington, DC and is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. It consists of 13 symposia and attracts approximately 2,500 attendees, including several researchers from industry. On December 8, Prof. Subramaniam also organized the NSF JUNO PI meeting, held in the SEH. The JUNO program is a joint program between Japanese and US researchers on large-scale communication networks. The PI meeting included project presentations from the PIs of the funded projects, as well as a keynote talk titled “Stormy Clouds,” delivered by Prof. Muriel Medard, the Cecil H. Green Professor of EECS at MIT.