Shahriar Nick Rahimi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor School of Computing Sciences & EngineeringUniversity of Southern Mississippi118 College Drive
Hattiesburg, MS 39402 Office: TEC 330Phone: (601)266-4949 (main office)nick.rahimi@usm.edu

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Nick Rahimi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Cybersecurity Program Coordinator

Director, Computing Research Hub and Cyber Innovations Lab (CIL)

CAE-CD Point of Contact (PoC)

School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Dr. Nick Rahimi is an associate professor at the School of Computing Sciences & Computer Engineering (CSCE) at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), where he serves as the director of the Cyber Innovations Lab, Cybersecurity Program Coordinator, and Point of Contact (PoC) for the National Security Agency (NSA). His research focuses on cyber systems security and privacy, trustworthy AI in cybersecurity, decentralized systems and applications, brain-computer interface security, digital warfare and cybersecurity policy, and computing sciences education. Dr. Rahimi brings substantial teaching experience to his role, having developed courses in cybersecurity, computer science, and information technology. He is the author of numerous papers in the fields of computer science and cybersecurity. Currently, he advises and mentors more than twenty undergraduate and graduate students engaged in computer science and cybersecurity research. Dr. Rahimi earned his Ph.D. and master's degrees in computer science from Southern Illinois University, complemented by dual bachelor's degrees in computer software engineering and Information Systems Technologies with a concentration in Cybersecurity. . Additionally, he possesses over eight years of industry experience, having worked as a software engineer and project manager.

Research Interest: Cyber Systems Security & Privacy, Trustworthy AI in Cybersecurity, Decentralized and Distributed Systems & Applications, Brain-Computer Interface and Security, Digital Warfare & Cybersecurity Policy, Applied Cryptography, Computing Sciences Education

I am looking for hardworking, creative, and self-motivated graduate and undergraduate (PhD , Master & Bachelor) students with interests in cybersecurity, decentralized networks, machine learning and blockchain. If you are a student interested in joining my lab, please send me an email with your CV, research interests and contact information.

Recent News:

$1.24M has been awarded by the state of Mississippi and Amazon to establish a Maritime AI Innovation Lab and an MS program in Robotics and Intelligent Systems to accelerate AI adoption in Mississippi’s Blue Economy. Read more:https://governorreeves.ms.gov/governor-reeves-announces-launch-of-mississippi-ai-talent-accelerator-program-9-1-million-in-grants/

Excited to announce our $1.9M NSF STARSS program award! As senior personnel, I'm working with PI Dr. Broome and Co-PI Dr. Masterson to support 60 STEM scholarship recipients over the next 6 years https://www.usm.edu/arts-sciences/starss-program.php

Dr. Rahimi Chairs SEDE 2024 Conference Announces New Orleans for 2025

The 33rd International Conference on Software and Data Engineering (SEDE 2024) successfully concluded in San Diego, with proceedings published by Springer. As Program Chair, Dr. Nick Rahimi led the technical program which featured cutting-edge research in software engineering, data engineering, and AI.

Cyber Innovation Lab contributed two significant papers:

𝐓𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐜: 𝐀𝐝𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐎𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐖𝐞𝐛 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬.

Authors: NyZaireyus Harrison, Heather Broome, Yaju Shrestha, Alexander Robles, Aayush Gautam and Nick Rahimi

𝐓𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐜: 𝐄𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐈𝐨𝐓 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞: 𝐀 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐥𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐦𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Authors: Alkendria Mcnair, Divine Precious-Esue, Soundra Newson and Nick Rahimi

Dr. Rahimi has been appointed as Conference Chair for SEDE 2025, which will be held in New Orleans in October 2025. The Call for Papers will be announced soon.

"We're excited to bring SEDE to New Orleans next year," said Dr. Rahimi. "The city's vibrant atmosphere will provide an excellent backdrop for the exchange of innovative ideas in software and data engineering." For more information about SEDE 2025, please visit :https://www.isca-hq.org/SEDE/index.html

President Paul invited me to join the University's Strategic Enrollment Planning Action Team.

NSF AI Showcase at Capitol Hill

I recently had the honor of participating in the National Science Foundation's AI showcase on Capitol Hill. This event provided an excellent opportunity to present my awarded project and meet with Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan, the Director of NSF. Our discussion focused on the implications and potential impact of my research in the field of AI.

Representing The University of Southern Mississippi, USM School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering, and the state of Mississippi, I also had the privilege of meeting with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. We engaged in valuable discussions about the future of AI education and its impact on our region and beyond.

This showcase highlighted the importance of AI research and education, demonstrating how institutions like USM are contributing to advancements in this rapidly evolving field. The opportunity to interact directly with NSF leadership and members of Congress underscores the significance of our work in AI.

I have been awarded an NSF NAIRR Pilot allocation grant. This grant will enable my students to use the Vocareum AI Notebook cloud platform,.

My proposal to establish a new Computing Research Center (CRC) at our School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering (CSCE) has been selected to receive a $32,000 award from the Jimmy A. Payne Foundation.

This innovative initiative aims to create a center that will transform research engagement at CSCE.

$3300 has been awarded for Summer Grant for the Improvement of Instruction award for summer 2025.

$4500 has been awarded for Proposal Development funding "SecureBrainNet: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Framework for Brain-Computer Interfaces”

In a major milestone in our cybersecurity education efforts and in a collaboration with the National Guard, we were awarded $1.5 million from the Department of Labor to develop new cyber warfare curricula to address evolving threats. This initiative will train National Guard soldiers in cutting-edge cybersecurity practices while providing our students valuable opportunities to work alongside experts in the field.

New publication in the top-tier IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (Impact Factor 5 and CiteScore 7.2)
Saydul Akbar Murad, PhD student under Dr. Nick Rahimi, publishes
Unveiling Thoughts: A Review of Advancements in EEG Brain Signal Decoding into Text." This paper reviews recent advancements in decoding EEG brain signals into text, contributing to the field of brain-computer interfaces.

New publication in the top-tier IEEE Internet of Things Journal (impact factor 10.6):
Saydul Akbar Murad, PhD student under Dr. Nick Rahimi, publishes "Secure and Efficient Hierarchical P2P Fog Architecture: A Novel Approach for IoT." This paper explores novel approaches to ensuring data security and efficient resource management in IoT networks

University of Southern Mississippi has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense through the academic year 2028.

https://www.usm.edu/news/2023/release/center-of-academic-excellence-cyber-defense.php

$75,716 has been awarded for a year by NSF for Post- Baccalaureate Research Program for LSMAMP students.

Lab News:

Summer 2024:

It's our great pleasure to announce that our PhD Research Assistant Saydul Akbar Murad's paper "𝑼𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒊𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑻𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔: 𝑨 𝑹𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘 𝒐𝒇 𝑨𝒅𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝑬𝑬𝑮 𝑩𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝑺𝒊𝒈𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑫𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒐 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕" has recently been accepted at IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 5 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞 7.2).

Summer 2024:

New Conference Paper Publication Acceptance:

Title: Navigating the Ethical Landscape of Big Data Collection and Analysis
Authors: Nick Rahimi, Sarah Lee
Conference: The 2024 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, & Applied Computing (CSCE'24)
Co-Sponsored by IEEE and IEEE Systems Council

2. New Book chapter Publication:

Title: Entrepreneurship Opportunities in Cybersecurity", to appear in Role of ICT in Transforming Business & Management Practices, Apple Academic Press/ CRC Press, USA, 2024.
Nick Rahimi, Saydul Akbar Murad, and Sarah Lee

April & May 2024:

Saydul Akbar Murad was being selected as one of the winners in The Proposal Project in CAS College. He has awarded $500.
New Book Chapter publication:

Title: Security Challenges in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

Authors: Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi, Indranil Roy, Bidyut Gupta

Publisher: Taylr & Farncis Group

New Conference Paper Publication Acceptance:

Title: Analysis of Zero Day Attack Detection Using Mlp and Xai
Authors:Ashim Dahal, Orabin Bajgai, Nick Rahimi
Conference: the 23rd International Conference on Security & Management (SAM'24)
Co-Sponsored by IEEE and IEEE Systems Council

Feb & March 2024:

Sindhuja Penchala awarded $200 for travel funds from the college.
Sindhuja presented :Unveiling Text Mining Potential: A Comparative Analysis of Document Classification Algo at 39th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (CATA 2024)- New Orleans
Our paper :On further improvement of data look-up latency in Residue Class (RC) based Peer-2-Peer networks, awarded the bet paper finalist at 39th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (CATA 2024)- New Orleans

Jan 2024:

Two manuscripts accepted for presentation and publication at 39th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (CATA 2024)
- On further improvement of data look-up latency in Residue Class (RC) based Peer-2-Peer networks
- Unveiling Text Mining Potential: A Comparative Analysis of Document Classification Algorithms
One manuscript submitted to The The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computing and Machine Intelligence (ICMI 2024) 2024 Conference.
- Analyzing Darknet Traffic: Classification and Mitigation of Adversarial Attacks

December 2023:

One manuscript submitted to The 62nd ACMSE 2024 Conference.
- Enabling Seamless Healthcare Services with RC-Based Geographical Peer-to-Peer Fog Architecture in the Healthcare 4.0
Two manuscripts submitted to 39th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (CATA 2024):
- On further improvement of data look-up latency in Residue Class (RC) based Peer-2-Peer networks
- Unveiling Text Mining Potential: A Comparative Analysis of Document Classification Algorithms

November 2023:

1. Rabeea Fatima and Sajim Ahmed represented USM and the CIL lab very well at the GC3 Conference. Their research poster, titled 'A Machine Learning Approach for Ransomware Detection,' was awarded first place at the conference. The 10th annual Gulf Coast Chapters Conference (GC3) was held in Biloxi, MS, where researchers from Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi showcased their research findings.

2. New Journal Acceptance

Title: Priority Based Job Scheduling Technique that Utilizes Gaps to Increase the Efficiency of Job Distribution in Cloud Computing  
Journal: Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, Elsevier.

October 2023:

1. During an invited talk at Oklahoma State University, Dr. Rahimi presented a novel research titled 'CryptoLoc: Secure Decentralized Location-based Cryptography without GPS'.

2. Saydul Akbar Murad represented USM and CIL Lab at "IEEE- 10th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS 2023), San Antonio, and presented: Secure and Scalable Permissioned Blockchain using LDE-P2P Networks

3. Rabeea Fatima and Sajim Ahmed, undergraduate researchers at the CIL lab, recently submitted a poster titled 'A Machine Learning Approach for Ransomware Detection' to the Gulf Coast Annual Regional Conference (GC3). Excitingly, the poster has been accepted.

September 2023:

1. New Conference Paper Publication Acceptance:

Title: Secure and Scalable Permissioned Blockchain using LDE-P2P Networks
Authors: Saydul Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi
Conference: 10th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS 2023), San Antonio, Texas , USA. October 23-25, 2023
Co-Sponsored by IEEE and IEEE Systems Council

2. Saydul Akbar Murad awarded another $300 for travel funds from the Graduate School.

August 2023:

New Journal Publication

Title: SG-PBFS: Shortest Gap-Priority Based Fair Scheduling technique for job scheduling in cloud environment
Authors: Saydul Akbar Murad, Zafril Rizal M. Azmi, Abu Jafar Md Muzahid, MD. Khairul Bashar Bhuiyan, Md Saib, Nick Rahimi, Nusrat Jahan Prottasha, Anupam Kumar Bairagi
Journal: Future Generation Computer Systems, Elsevier. Impact Factor: 7.5

Saydul Akbar Murad awarded $500 for travel funds from the Graduate Committee in the School of BEES

July 2023:

Saydul Akbar Murad presented PhishGuard: Machine Learning-Powered Phishing URL Detection at IEEE CPS International Conference. The presentation can be viewed via the link provided above
New Book Chapter Publication Acceptance:

Title: Security Challenges in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
Authors: Seydul Akbar Murad, Nick Rahimi, Indranil Roy, Bidyut Gupta
Journal: CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group -Date: 26 Jun 2023

June 2023: New Journal Publication Acceptance:

Title: The Advantages of Optimizing Reaction Conditions Using Machine Learning to Improve and Predict Yield for the Polyol Millifluidic Synthesis of Silver Nanowires
Authors: Destiny Williams, Nick Rahimi, James Smay, Shohreh Hemmati
Journal: Springer, Applied Nanoscience
Date: 22 Jun 2023

April 2023: A research paper entitled: "PhishGuard: Machine Learning-Powered Phishing URL Detection" accepted in Las Vegas, Nevada: IEEE CPS /The 2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence.
April 2023: Seydul Akbar Murad, an PhD student in Cyber Innovations Lab presented his paper on the "Design of a New Secured Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer Fog Architecture Based on Linear Diophantine Equation" at the 38th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (CATA-2023).

March 2023: Heather Broome and Yaju Shrestha , undergraduate researchers at Cyber Innovations Lab awarded 2nd place in computing Undergraduate Symposium for Research and Creative Activity at Southern Miss. Their reserach entitled : "Darknet Traffic Classification and Adversarial Attacks." Aayush Gautam and NyZaireyus Harrison are collaborating in this research as well.

April 2023: Aayush Gautam awarded Drapeau Summer Research Grant for $4000. Aayush will be working on "Deep Learning Approaches for Detecting Advanced Persistent Threats in Enterprise Networks" under supervisor of Dr. Rahimi. Congratulations Aayush!
March 2023- Aayush Gautam, an undergrad researcher presented his first-ever research paper on the "Viability of Machine Learning in Android Scareware Detection" at the 38th International Conference on Computers and Their Applications (CATA-2023)

May 2023: New Journal Publication Acceptance:

Title: Secured Communication in Generalized Non DHT-based Pyramid Tree
Authors: Nick Rahimi, Indranil Roy, Ziping Liu, Bidyut Gupta, Narayan Debnath
Journal: International Journal of Computers and Their Applications (IJCA)
Date: 28 May 2023

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