REU Fellows Search for Ways to Secure Mobile Devices and Wireless Networks

Pictured from left: Siddhi Suresh (Southern Connecticut State University), James Roy (University of Cambridge), Ronie Rocca (New York Institute of Technology), and Mohamed Elsayed (New York Institute of Technology), presented their project “Investigating the Effect of Machine-Translation on Automated Classification of Toxic Comments.”

New York Tech’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program has completed another successful session. Through the program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), 10 students, known as REU fellows, collaborated with New York Tech faculty and graduate students in research on methods to secure mobile devices and wireless networks.

“It was great to be back in person for our REU program after two years,” said N. Sertac Artan, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, who oversees the program. “We are proud of our wonderful group of REU fellows with diverse backgrounds. They worked diligently to complete their research projects in a short period with excellent results. I cannot thank my co-principal investigator, Professor Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D., all the faculty mentors, and our staff enough for another successful year. We are also grateful to the NSF and College of Engineering and Computing Sciences for their support of the New York Tech REU program.”

“The NSF REU program supports undergraduate research with REU site grants and REU supplemental grants. New York Tech being an REU site, by definition, has become a hub of undergraduate student innovation by attracting high-achieving and motivated students from around the country to work with our faculty over an intensive few weeks every summer,” said Dean Babak D. Beheshti, Ph.D. “We are proud that the college has been an REU site for so many years, delivering a life-changing research experience to students.”

The 10-week program ran from May 31 through August 5, and the students presented their projects on the last day of the program.

New York Tech life sciences student Kim Metoua presented her research on “Fast and Secure Non-Intrusive MM-Wave Scanning.”

REU Fellow Research Projects:

Project: “EnsembleDroid: A Malware Detection Approach for Android System based on Ensemble Learning”
REU Fellow: Sharon Guan (Stony Brook University)
Faculty Mentor: Associate Professor Wenjia Li, Ph.D.

Project: “Investigating the Effect of Machine-Translation on Automated Classification of Toxic Comments”
REU Fellows: James Roy (University of Cambridge), Siddhi Suresh (Southern Connecticut State University), Mohamed Elsayed (New York Institute of Technology)
Intern: Ronie Rocca (New York Institute of Technology)
Faculty Mentors: Professor Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D., Professor Huanying (Helen) Gu, Ph.D., and Associate Professor N. Sertac Artan

Project: “Smartphone User Authentication using Swipe Gestures on a Keyboard”
REU Fellows: Alvin E. Kuruvilla (Hofstra University), Usman Sheikh (Stony Brook University)
Faculty Mentors: Associate Professor Kiran Balagani,Ph.D., Associate Professor Paolo Gasti,Ph.D., and Assistant Professor Anand Santhanakrishnan, Ph.D.

Project: “Privacy Preservation in Emotion Recognition Under Federated Learning Settings”
REU Fellow: Jason Nuñez (Amherst College)
Faculty Mentor: Assistant Professor Houwei Cao, Ph.D.

Project: “Machine-Translation from Monolingual Corpora using a BERT-based model”
REU Fellow: James Roy (University of Cambridge)
Faculty Mentors: Professor Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D., Professor Huanying (Helen) Gu, Ph.D., and Associate Professor N. Sertac Artan, Ph.D.

Project: “Feasibility and Quality of a MATLAB Implementation for an Intelligent Reflective Surface”
REU Fellow: Garrett Fairbanks (Indiana University)
Faculty Mentor: Assistant Professor Reza Amineh, Ph.D.

Faculty Mentor: Assistant Professor Reza Amineh, Ph.D.
Project: “Fast and Secure Non-Intrusive MM-Wave Scanning”
REU Fellow: Kim Metoua (New York Institute of Technology)
Faculty Mentor: Assistant Professor Anand Santhanakrishnan, Ph.D.

Project: “Human Factors in Security: A Neuroimaging Cybersecurity Experiment”
REU Fellow: Emily Tanabe (Lewis and Clark College)
Faculty Mentor: Associate Professor N. Sertac Artan, Ph.D.