Edge computing, ad-blocking, and more: CyLab announces 2020 seed funding awardees

Daniel Tkacik

Feb 26, 2020

Over $500K in seed funding has been awarded to 10 different CyLab faculty in six different departments across three colleges at CMU. Funding was awarded based on the projects’ intellectual merit, originality, fit towards CyLab’s priorities, and potential impact.

“We’re excited to be able to fund a wide variety of security and privacy projects at various stages of development,” said CyLab director Lorrie Cranor. “We’re seeding new projects, filling funding gaps for established projects that are making good progress, and helping some great CMU research transition into practice.” 

We’re excited to be able to fund a wide variety of security and privacy projects at various stages of development.

Lorrie Cranor, Director, CyLab

The awards selection committee, made up of CMU faculty without a conflict of interest, prioritized the following aspects in no particular order when making their selections:

  • Collaboration between CyLab faculty in multiple departments
  • Projects led by or having significant involvement of junior faculty
  • Seed projects that are good candidates for follow-on funding from government or industry sources
  • Projects that are making good progress but reaching the end of their previous funding and need funding to finish or to continue the project until other sources of funding are obtained
  • Efforts to transition research to practice, e.g. by preparing software for release as open source projects, conducting field trials, or deploying research results in real-world applications
  • Projects that can get started quickly and make significant progress with a small amount of funding
  • Non-traditional projects that may be difficult to fund through other sources
  • Education or outreach projects aimed at broadening participation in the security and privacy field

Recipients of the awards will be required to submit brief quarterly reports outlining the progress of the project and present a talk or poster at the annual CyLab Partners Conference.

Edge Computing for Real-Time Policy-Guided Video Privacy

  • PI: Norman Sadeh, Professor, Institute for Software Research (ISR)

Formal Modeling and Security Analysis of Intermittently-Powered Javacard Systems

  • Co-PI: Limin Jia, Associate Research Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Information Networking Institute (INI)
  • Co-PI: Brandon Lucia, Associate Professor, ECE 

Large-Scale Analysis of Medically-Targeted Online Advertising and User Health Privacy Concerns

  • PI: Tim Libert, Special Faculty Instructor, ISR 

The Impact of Ad-Blocking and Anti-Tracking on Consumers’ Online Behavior and Welfare

Making smart homes safe for incidental users

  • Co-PI: Lujo Bauer, Professor, ECE and ISR
  • Co-PI: Camille Cobb, Post-Doctoral Researcher, CyLab 

Themis: A watchdog service for Internet Fairness

  • PI: Justine Sherry, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department (CSD)

Toward Robust Predictive Security Analytics

Verified Compilation using Type-Oriented Language Merging

Using Blockchains to Transform Secure Multi-Party Computation

Static Enforcement of Information Flow Policies on Event-driven Programs