Prinkle Sharma and Vidhyashree Nagaraju, who completed their PhDs in Computer Engineering, have accepted tenure track faculty appointments at nationally ranked universities.
Prinkle Sharma and Vidhyashree Nagaraju, 2020 Computer Engineering PhD graduates, have accepted tenure track faculty positions at nationally ranked universities.
Dr. Sharma will join the University at Albany, State University of New York, Department of Information Security and Digital Forensics, which is accredited by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education and offers several cybersecurity-focused degrees and certificates. Dr. Nagaraju will join the Tandy School of Computer Science at the University of Tulsa, which is an NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations and recipient of a $6.4 million CyberCorps(R) Scholarship for Service (SFS) grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a superior cybersecurity workforce.
Misbehavior Detection in Vehicular Networks with Machine Learning
Sharma’s research utilizes context-adaptive machine learning techniques to secure V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) communication. Her dissertation research resulted in the development of several new tools including (1) a misbehavior detection framework, which couples novel plausibility checks with supervised machine learning techniques, (2) real-time detection procedures based on a novel data-centric misbehavior detection system, developed specifically for highway traffic, and (3) adversarial attack systems with deep learning to identify vulnerabilities in existing solutions. Her research will help safeguard the security and privacy of vehicular networks, including connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV), which society awaits with great anticipation.
Software Reliability and Security Assessment: Modeling and Algorithms
Nagaraju’s research involves the development of mathematical models and statistical algorithms to quantitatively assess the software testing process. Contributions of the research she performed as part of a dissertation include (1) efficient multi-phase algorithms that utilize a combination of robust global search and numerical methods to achieve a combination of stability and performance when estimating the parameters of a model, (2) a modeling framework to characterize changes in the fault detection process due to changes in the software under test, testing activities, and environment, and (3) a model to explicitly consider the impact of multiple testing activities and efficiently guide the allocation of limited testing resources. Her research has been incorporated into open-source tools, which enjoy widespread use by a variety of organizations that support the acquisition of complex software-intensive systems.
Both Sharma and Nagaraju will join thriving programs in fall 2020, where they will have the opportunity to share their knowledge through teaching and research with graduate and undergraduate students at their new institutions.