Welcome

I am a Professor at the University of South Florida, affiliated with the Florida Center for Cybersecurity, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Department of Electrical Engineering. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Department of Computer Science and my M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the North Carolina State University, respectively. My Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science is "Resource Optimization and Security in Distributed Computing" under the direction of Dr. Harry Perros. I also received my Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Claremont Graduate School. I have published referred papers in leading journals and conferences, such as ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Automatica, International Journal of Control, and Journal of Mathematics Analysis and Its Applications. One of my papers has over 139O citations on Google Scholar. Before returning to academia, I had worked in IT industry for several years. I received the Invention Achievement Award and the Publication Award at IBM in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Moreover, I received the Best Demo Award at the 22nd GENI Engineering Conference (GEC22) and the US Ignite Application Summit with my team in 2015. I was also a recipient of the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award and the Student Recognition Award for Teaching Excellence, both from the Texas A&M University Systems in 2010. National Science Foundation (NSF), NSF/BBN, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Amazon AWS, Florida Center for Cybersecurity (FC2), and Office of Naval Research (ONR) have recently supported my research. I am a senior member of both the IEEE and the ACM.

Openings

I am recruiting self-motivated and hard-working undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in computer and network security, Internet of Things (IoT), computer networks, cloud computing, mobile computing, and/or cyberinfrastructures for smart cities. Students with a relatively strong mathematical background are preferred. We welcome applications from science and engineering disciplines such as CS/CSE, ECE/EE, Math and Statisitcs, and IE. If interested, please email me your resume with supporting materials.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the broad areas of Security, Networking, and Big Data Analytics with a focus on experiments and modeling in the following domains.
  • Cyber physical systems (e.g., power grids, emergency response, and transportation)
  • User and attacker behavior analytics with social sciences
  • Cloud computing and mobile networks (e.g., smartphones)
  • Sensor networks (e.g., video/sensor surveillance for target tracking)
  • Internet of Things (IoT) and cyberinfrastructures for smart cities
  • Applied cryptography and theoretical foundation of computer science
  • Mathematical modeling and statistical data analysis for computer science, computer engineering, and health-care problems

Selected Recognitions and Awards

Best Demo Award, the 22th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC) and US Ignite Application Summit, 2015
Best Paper Award, the 13th IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (DASC), 2014
Fellow of the AFRL Summer Faculty Research Program
Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, Texas A&M University System, 2010
Student Recognition Award for Teaching Excellence, Texas A&M University System, 2010
Running-up Winner of the Best Student Paper Award, IEEE Globecom, 2006
Publication Award, IBM, 2004
Invention Achievement Award, IBM, 2003

Selected Professional Activities

Steering Committee Co-Chair: CNERT 2014-2016
TPC Chair/Organizer: FGRE 2014-2016, CNERT 2014, ICA3PP 2013, GREE 2012-2015
Workshop Chair: IEEE TrustCom 2016
Publicity Chair: CNERT 2015-2016
Web Chair: CNERT 2016
Vice Chair, Rochester chapter of IEEE Communication Society, 2013-2015