CyLab awards 2023 seed funding

Apr 17, 2023

collage of researchers who received seed funding (in order of names listed in story)

This year, CyLab has awarded $450K in seed funding to 20 faculty, staff, and students in five departments across three colleges at CMU. The funding was awarded on the projects’ intellectual merit, originality, potential impact, and fit towards the Security and Privacy Institute’s priorities. 

"We are very excited to be able to fund so many great projects this year,” said Lorrie Cranor, director of CyLab, and professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy Department. “These funds help seed new collaborations and assist our junior faculty and postdocs as they start new research that will hopefully grow into larger externally-funded projects.”

"We are grateful to our partners for their support in enabling us to provide seed funding for cutting-edge research projects that have the potential to impact the world," said CyLab's Director of Partnerships, Michael Lisanti. "Their commitment is critical to our mission of creating a world in which technology can be trusted and protecting the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide."

The awards selection committee comprised CyLab-affiliated faculty, who prioritized several aspects 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

Funded Projects: 


Fuzzing for Stateful Performance Issues

Provably Efficient and Secure Decentralized Algorithms for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Usable Test Generation for Security

Light-Weight Homomorphic Secret Sharing from Sparse Decoding Problems

Adaptive Graceful Degradation for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems

Robust, Casual Estimates of Social Influence on Security Behavior

Engaging End Users and Developers to Improve App Store Privacy Audits

Scale-Out Hardware Architecture for Privacy-Preserving Computing

Towards Inclusive Security and Privacy: Design for Digital Security and Privacy for the Homeless Population

  • Hong Shen - Assistant Research Professor, HCII
  • Fei Fang - Assistant Professor, S3D
     

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