Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
School: Engineering and Computing Sciences
Campus: Manhattan

Member of NYIT Since: 2010

From network forensics to engineering tools for "smart marketing," Cecilia Dong believes that creativity is the key to realizing business ideas – a point she routinely makes to her students.

"There are many challenges out there waiting for students to solve," says Dong, who collaborated with students and faculty members on designing a mobile app of NYIT's Old Westbury campus map.

Dong came up with the idea after interviewing for her job at the Old Westbury campus, where she got lost. Later, she found out her students often had the same problem.

"This is a great opportunity for our students to be able to contribute something to our school, and we learned a lot during the design process," she says. "The students started from no background in app design to completing the map app project, and I'm really proud of what they built in one semester."

In just one year at NYIT, Dong has challenged her students to solve a number of other quandaries. She teaches Design Projects, a one-year capstone project during which some of her students have collaborated with technology company Quanser to design a mechatronic system of balancing a ball on a 2-D plate.

She also has worked with students on a social network project, presented in April 2011 at SOURCE. They developed a tool to collect tweets from Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and are using the data for "opinion-mining" or assessing social trends and behavior. Dong says this knowledge can be useful to marketers selling products to specific groups or in building a "smart engine" to help psychologists in their research.

Currently, Dong has four patents pending and is studying network forensics, a way of "fingerprinting the bad guys" as she calls cyber criminals. She recently submitted a proposal to study mobile phone security, a topic of interest at the 2011 Cyber Security Conference on Sept. 15, where she participated in a faculty poster session.

"With all the smart phones in the market and people doing online banking, we are seeing a lot more attackers hacking into these phones," she says.

In addition to research pursuits, Dong mentors young girls interested in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math) as part of NYIT's partnership with the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum.

"It's important to get them exposure of what girls can do at an earlier age," Dong says.

She discovered her knack for math and making robots while in elementary school in China. "I think engineering is cool," she says. "It's cool to find out how things are working and is rewarding when you find solutions to problems."