CyLab awards 2024 seed funding

This year, CyLab has awarded $400K in seed funding to 17 CMU students, faculty, and staff members representing five departments at the university. The funding was awarded on the projects’ intellectual merit, originality, potential impact, and fit towards the Security and Privacy Institute’s priorities. 

“This year’s funded projects represent and address a wide range of research competencies and challenges,” said Lorrie Cranor, director of CyLab, and professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy Department. “These funds will address critical needs that will hopefully evolve into larger projects with additional external funding.”

“We are thankful to our partners for their support in empowering us to provide seed funding for these groundbreaking projects that have great potential for real-world application and positive societal impact,” said Michael Lisanti, CyLab's director of partnerships. "Together, with our partners, we are driving innovation and shaping a more secure digital landscape for all.”

The awards selection committee comprised CyLab-affiliated faculty, who prioritized several factors when making their selections, including collaborations that include junior faculty and between CyLab faculty in multiple departments, seed projects that are good candidates for follow-up funding from government or industry sources, and non-traditional projects that may be difficult to fund through other sources, among other considerations.

Funded Projects

Attacking LLM Watermarks by Exploiting Their Strengths

• Wenting Zheng - assistant professor, Computer Science Department
• Virginia Smith - Leonardo assistant professor of Machine Learning

LLMs for Code-injection Vulnerability Detection

• Beidi Chen - assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Limin Jia - research professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Corina Pasareanu - principal systems scientist, CyLab

Security Attacks and Robust Defense against LLMs

• Lei Li - assistant professor, Language Technologies Institute
• Daphne Ippolito - assistant professor, Language Technologies Institute
• Steven Wu - assistant professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Synergies and Trade-offs in Private Federated Learning

• Gauri Joshi - associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Zhiwei Steven Wu - assistant professor, School of Computer Science, Software and Societal Systems Department

Amplifying Privacy and Scalability in Decentralized Learning

• Osman Yağan - research professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Carlee Joe-Wong - Robert E. Doherty career development professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Mansi Sood - Ph.D. candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering

ROSLock: Assuring Secure and Private Communications in ROS-based Robots

• Claire Le Goues - associate professor, School of Computer Science, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Christopher Timperley - systems scientist, School of Computer Science, Software and Societal Systems Department

Increasing Assurance in Verified Production Compilers

• Fraser Brown - assistant professor, School of Computer Science, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Bryan Parno - The Kavcic-Moura professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Practical, Software-Only Mitigations Against Frequency Side-Channel Attacks

• Riccardo Paccagnella - assistant professor, School of Computer Science, Software and Societal Systems Department