CyLab names 2019 Presidential Fellows

Each year, CyLab awards Presidential Fellowships to high-achieving, exemplary graduate students who are researching topics around security and privacy. Each fellowship covers one year of tuition.

This year’s Fellows were selected by a committee of CyLab faculty, including Nicolas Christin, Yuvraj Agarwal, Virgil Gligor, Radu Marculescu, and Corina Pasareanu. Committee members did not participate in the evaluation of any of their own students who were nominated.

This year’s CyLab Presidential Fellowship recipients are:

 

Aymeric Fromherz

Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Co-advised by ECE professor Bryan Parno and CyLab research professor Corina Pasareanu

Fromherz’s research focuses on designing and focusing secure-by-construction systems. Most of his recent work is about providing formal security guarantees for highly efficient implementations of cryptographic primitives and protocols. 

“Machine learning algorithms increasingly permeate our environment. With this fellowship's support, I hope to apply my expertise in formal methods to defend against attacks on neural networks.”

 

Pardis Emami-Naeini

Ph.D. student in the Software and Societal Systems (ISR), Co-advised by Engineering and Public Policy/ISR professor Lorrie Cranor and ISR/Computer Science Department (CSD) professor Yuvraj Agarwal

Emami-Naeini’s research focuses on creating tools and methods that enable people to make better security and privacy decisions in the world of the Internet of Things (IoT).

“Large-scale user studies are expensive to conduct properly, but the CyLab Presidential Fellowship will provide me with more freedom to conduct projects I was envisioning in order to design a usable and effective privacy and security label for IoT devices.”

 

Hana Habib

Ph.D. student in Societal Computing, Advised by EPP/ISR professor Lorrie Cranor

Habib’s research explores the usability of consumer privacy choices, such as opt-outs for email marketing and targeted advertising. She hopes to identify usability barriers with existing privacy choices and solutions to mitigate them so that consumers can ultimately have greater control over their privacy.

“This fellowship will allow me to make a meaningful contribution to privacy research through fulfilling a need for a validated set of concrete design guidelines that companies and regulators can refer to for providing meaningful privacy choices to users.”

 

Yifan Song

Ph.D. student in the CSD, Advised by CSD professor Vipul Goyal 

Song’s research aims to construct a communication-efficient multi-party computation (MPC) protocol, which allows several parties who do not trust each other to securely compute a function.

“I feel very honored to be selected as one of the CyLab Presidential Fellows. This funding will greatly support my research on designing communication-efficient MPC protocols.”