Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) Blog

Jingjing Yao, a PhD candidate at New Jersey Institute of Technology, will present a talk on Tuesday, May 11, at 3:00 p.m,.

In her talk, “Intelligent and Secure Fog-Aided Internet of Drones,” Yao discusses the utilization of energy harvesting technology to charge drone batteries and investigate wireless power control to adjust the drone wireless transmission power to reduce drone energy consumption.

Yao’s research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Drones (IoD), Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning, Cybersecurity, Mobile Edge Computing/Caching, and Energy Harvesting.

Join the virtual talk here.

Talk Title

Intelligent and Secure Fog-Aided Internet of Drones

Talk Abstract

Internet of drones (IoD), which deploys several drones in the air to collect ground information and send them to the IoD gateway for further processing, can be applied in traffic surveillance and disaster rescue. Fog-aided IoD provisions future events prediction and image classification by machine learning technologies, where massive training data are collected by drones and analyzed in the fog node. However, the performance of IoD is greatly affected by drones’ battery capacities. Also, aggregating all data in the fog node may incur huge network traffic and drone data privacy leakage. The speaker will share her vision and research to address these two challenges.

In this talk, the speaker utilizes energy harvesting technology to charge drone batteries and investigate wireless power control to adjust the drone wireless transmission power to reduce drone energy consumption. The joint optimization of power control and energy harvesting scheduling is investigated in time-varying IoD networks to minimize the long-term average system energy cost constrained by the drone battery capacities and quality of service (QoS) requirements. A modified actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm is designed to address the joint optimization problem in time-varying IoD networks.

To prevent the privacy leakage of IoD, the speaker utilizes federated learning (FL) by performing local training in drones and sharing all training model parameters in the fog node without uploading drone raw data. However, drone privacy can still be divulged to ground eavesdroppers by wiretapping and analyzing uploaded parameters during the FL training process. The power control problem is hence investigated to maximize the FL system security rate constrained by drone battery capacities and the FL training time requirement. An algorithm with low computational complexity is then designed to tackle the security rate maximization problem and its performance is demonstrated by extensive simulations.

Biography

Jingjing Yao is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). She will receive her Ph.D. degree from NJIT in May 2021.

She received the M.E. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and the B.E. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from the Dalian University of Technology (DUT).

She has published 13 first-author journal articles and 7 first-author conference papers. Her research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Drones (IoD), Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning, Cybersecurity, Mobile Edge Computing/Caching, and Energy Harvesting.

Tara Salman, a final-year PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will present a talk on Tuesday, April 27, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.

In her talk, “A Collaborative Knowledge-Based Security Solution using Blockchains,” she will present her work on redesigning the blockchains and building a collaborative, distributed, intelligent, and hostile solution that can be used for security purposes.

Talk Title

A Collaborative Knowledge-Based Security Solution using Blockchains

Talk Abstract

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have recently gained wide adaptation in building intelligent yet simple and proactive security solutions such as intrusion identification, malware detection, and threat intelligence. With the increased risk and severity of cyber-attacks and the distributed nature of modern threats and vulnerabilities, it becomes critical to pose a distributed intelligent solution that evaluates the systems’ and networks’ security collaboratively. Blockchain, as a decade-old successful distributed ledger technology, has the potential to build such collaborative solutions. However, to be used for such solutions, the technology needs to be extended so that it can intelligently process the stored information and achieve a collective decision about security risks or threats that might target a system.

In this talk, I will present our work on redesigning the blockchains and build a collaborative, distributed, intelligent, and hostile solution that can be used for security purposes. In particular, we will discuss our work on (1) extending blockchains for general collaborative decision-making applications, where knowledge should be made out of decisions, risks, or any information stored on the blockchain; (2) applying the proposed extensions to security applications such as malware detection and threat intelligence.

Biography

Tara Salman is a final year Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is advised by Raj Jain. She previously received her MS and BSc degrees from Qatar University in 2015 and 2012, respectively. Her research aims to integrate state-of-the-art technologies to provide scalable, collaborative, and intelligent cybersecurity solutions.

Her recent work focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, blockchains, and security applications. The work spans several fields, including blockchain technology, security, machine learning, and deep learning applications, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. She has been selected for the EECS Rising Star in UC Berkeley 2020. Her research has been published in more than twenty internationally recognized conferences and journals and supported by national and international funds.