Innovation Boot Camp for Virginia undergraduate and graduate students 

Congrats to Cong Wang for
NSF CAREER Award!

Cong Wang, an assistant professor in cyber security engineering at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant for a project on memory-efficient, heterogeneity-aware, and robust architecture for federated intelligence on edge devices.

"This research will address an urgent problem to bridge the gap between the vast data available from consumer’s edge devices and the rising interest of utilizing such private data to improve our well-being," Wang said. 

He is the third CCI researcher to receive a prestigious NSF CAREER Award this year! Congratulations!

CCI researcher-developed tool is commercialized

A cybersecurity risk measurement tool developed at the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), a DHS Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was recently selected as the winner of the Homeland Security Startup Studio (HSSS) 2021 program. 
 

The tool was developed by Sachin Shetty, CCI Fellow and professor with the Department of Computational, Modeling, and Simulation Engineering and executive director for the Center of Secure and Intelligent Critical Systems in the Virginia Modeling Analysis and Simulation Center at Old Dominion University, and his team. 
 

The risk measurement tool, known as the Cyber Risk Scoring and Mitigation (CRISM) tool, measures the security capabilities of the software and hardware that comprise a company’s cloud IT infrastructure. Over the past several years, the research team, called Charisma Cyber, developed an analytics engine for the tool.
 

This analytics engine enables customers to extract critical, actionable intelligence that can be used to gain more visibility into the cybersecurity posture of their infrastructure. Such insights include all possible impacts to an asset, a list of all paths to a target, identification of the path most likely to be taken by an attacker, additional vulnerabilities in the instance of an attacker compromising an asset, and a proposed solution to improve the risk score.
 

“It is indeed gratifying to see the commercial potential of CRISM's core technology focused on measuring cyber risk and prioritized remediation,” Shetty said in a CIRI article.

MITRE offering undergrad/grad student capstone project opportunity

Virginia students who want to work on a capstone project with MITRE, a federally funded research and development center, have a new opportunity to work with information theory, machine learning, and signal processing. Contact Justin Cray at jcray@mitre.org and cc capstones@mitre.org.

More about the MITRE project: "Measuring Channel Capacity Using Machine Learning for Evaluation of Radio Receivers" aims to measure channel capacity across non-additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, which is quite challenging as there is often not a closed form solution for fading channels. Several different methods have been proposed to estimate mutual information using modified versions of the k-nearest-neighbors algorithm. By estimating mutual information, channel capacity can be calculated. These techniques can be used for evaluating the efficacy of equalizers and other receiver components by measuring the changes in mutual information. MATLAB may be used to complete this task as it has many of the needed mathematical and machine learning functions.

More to Come