Professor Sajal Das, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA

Talk Title: Secure and Resilient CPS for Smart Living: A Unified Data Science Approach

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as smart grid, smart transportation, smart water distribution networks, smart manufacturing, smart healthcare, and smart agriculture aim to improve human quality of life and make the society a safer place to live in. However, smart living CPS are vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks/threats (e.g., false data injection, data poisoning or evasion, deliberate data manipulation or perturbation) and extreme-weather events causing system malfunctions. Detecting and interpreting such threats in real time is vital to proactively respond to the underlying cause and prevent immediate impacts on civilians and the economy. Threats manifest themselves as anomalies in the sensed time series data or machine learning model parameters, and can be formulated as an anomaly detection problem, where we first learn the underlying mathematical structure of benign behavior and then detect anomalies as deviations from the learned structure. This talk will propose a unified theory for detecting anomalies (threats) in smart living CPS in a lightweight, timely, and unsupervised manner. The approach is based on computing new invariants and latent space that use time series data analytics, machine learning, information theory, and reputation scoring, and ecology models. The proposed unified theory will be validated using real-world data collected from multiple CPS domains such as smart grid, smart transportation, and smart water networks. The talk will be concluded with future research directions.

Biography: Dr. Sajal K. Das is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla where he was the Chair of Computer Science Department during 2013-2017. Previously, he served the NSF as a Program Director in CISE directorate. His interdisciplinary research interests include CPS, IoT, drones, cybersecurity, machine learning, data science, wireless and sensor networks, mobile and pervasive computing, smart environments, edge/cloud computing, and applied graph theory and game theory. He has made fundamental contributions to these areas and published extensively in high quality journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings, numerous book chapters, 4 books, and 5 US patents. Dr. Das has directed over USD24 million in funded projects. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 102 with more than 44,000 citations. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. A founder of IEEE PerCom, IEEE WoWMoM, IEEE SMARTCOMP, and ACM ICDCN conferences, he has served as General and Technical Program Chair of numerous conferences. He is a recipient of 14 Best Paper Awards at prestigious conferences including ACM MobiCom and IEEE PerCom. He also received awards of excellence for teaching, mentoring, research, and innovation including the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement award and the University of Missouri System President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence. He has graduated 11 postdoctoral fellows, 51 PhD and 31 MS thesis students. A Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Dr. Das is a Fellow of the IEEE, National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA).

Professor Salil Kanhere, University of New South Wales, Australia

Talk Title: The Long Trajectory to Trajectory Privacy

Abstract: Our daily movements disclose plenty of sensitive information about us - from our habits to religious and political opinions. At the same time, location trajectories are helpful for various applications such as city planning, pandemic control, or marketing. Therefore, numerous approaches for protecting the privacy of trajectory data have been proposed. Nevertheless, recent works show that we are still far from our goal of releasing high-quality trajectories for arbitrary applications under strong guarantees. This talk will provide an overview of location trajectories and their privacy protection. First, we explore whether existing protection mechanisms hold up to their promises in the age of AI. Through a deep learning-based reconstruction attack, we show that even mechanisms using the de facto privacy standard, differential privacy, might be vulnerable. Based on this, we discuss a framework and goals for the design of satisfactory privacy protection mechanisms. As we find that the existing protection mechanisms struggle from a restrictive privacy-utility trade-off, we explore whether the generation of fake data represents the solution. Through a large-scale experimental study, we examine generative models for trajectory data. While their utility is impressive, this research direction still requires future work to satisfy all the set goals.

Biography: Salil Kanhere is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia and is affiliated with the UNSW Institute of Cybersecurity (IFCYBER). His research interests span various aspects of cyber security, pervasive computing, IoT, blockchain and applied machine learning. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles and is leading several government and industry-funded research projects on these topics. He received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2020) and the Humboldt Research Fellowship (2014) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He is an ACM Distinguished Member, an IEEE Senior Member and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor. He has held visiting positions at RWTH Aachen, I2R Singapore, Technical University Darmstadt, University of Zurich and Graz University of Technology. He serves as the Editor in Chief of the Ad Hoc Networks journal and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions On Network and Service Management, Computer Communications, and Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He has served on the organising committee of several IEEE/ACM international conferences and has co-authored two books.

Professor Yu Chen, Binghamton University, USA

Talk Title: Virtual Healthcare in the Metaverse Era

Abstract: As digital transformation reshapes the healthcare landscape, the convergence of virtual reality and medical services leads us to a new era in patient care. This keynote talk, Virtual Healthcare in the Metaverse Era, explores the pressing demands and multifaceted challenges inherent in virtual healthcare delivery, including accessibility, data security, and system interoperability. We will introduce the Metaverse and its more granular counterpart, the Microverse, as promising paradigms that can overcome traditional barriers, offering immersive and community-driven healthcare solutions. We will discuss VirCom, a Virtual Community Healthcare Framework designed to foster collaborative, patient-centered care in virtual environments. Through the lens of a case study on a Seniors Safety Monitoring System implemented within a Microverse, we will illustrate how these innovative models can enhance safety and support for vulnerable populations. The talk concludes by outlining open problems and opportunities, inviting dialogue on future research directions and practical implementations that can redefine the continuum of care in our increasingly digital world. Join us as we navigate the intersection of technology and healthcare, uncovering transformative potentials and charting a course for the future of virtual care in the metaverse era.

Biography: Yu Chen is an Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor at Binghamton University - State University of New York (SUNY). He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2006. Leading the Intelligent and Sustainable Edge Computing (I-SEC) Lab, his research is centered around Trust, Security, and Privacy within the Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing paradigm, focusing on Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and their applications in creating intelligent and interconnected environments. Dr. Chen’s publications include over 300 publications in scholarly journals, conference proceedings, and books. His research has been funded by NSF, DoD, AFOSR, AFRL, New York State, and industrial partners. He has served as a reviewer for NSF panels, the DoE Independent Review Panel, the European Research Council (ERC), international journals, and the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of prestigious conferences. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of SPIE, a Senior Member of ACM and IEEE, and a SIGMA XI and AFCEA member.

Dr. Roopa Vishwanathan, New Mexico State University, USA

Talk Title: Payment Channel Networks

Abstract: Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) have been proposed as an alternative solution to the scalability, throughput and cost overhead problems currently associated with blockchain transactions. By facilitating off-chain execution of transactions, PCNs significantly reduce the burden on the blockchain, leading to faster transaction processing, low latency, reduced transaction fees, and enhanced privacy. Despite these advantages, the current state-of-the-art in PCNs presents a variety of challenges that require further exploration. In this talk, we give an overview of several fundamental aspects of PCNs: pathfinding and routing, virtual channels, state channels, payment channel hubs, and rebalancing protocols, while highlighting important advancements in each of these areas. Additionally, we present the various unresolved challenges in these areas that require attention from the academic and research community.

Biography: Roopa Vishwanathan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM. Her areas of research are security and privacy, specifically applied cryptography, cryptocurrencies, Layer-2 protocols, and security of blockchain-based applications. Her current research has two broad focus areas: One focus area is Layer-2 mechanisms for blockchains. Layer-2 mechanisms, e.g., payment channel networks (PCNs) and rollups, are built on top of the base Layer-1 blockchain with the goal of improving scalability. Her group’s past results in this area include the design of decentralized routing protocols for PCNs, techniques for rebalancing depleted links in PCNs, distributed credit networks, mechanisms to do blockchain redaction/rewriting, and more. The other area she is interested in is cryptographic protocol design. Results in this area include design of secure revocable chameleon hash schemes, design of revocable attribute-based encryption schemes, verifiable escrow and fair exchange protocols.