CyLab awards 2025 seed funding

This year, CyLab has awarded more than $400K in seed funding to 16 CMU students, faculty, and staff members from 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.

One of the top priorities this year was funding projects related to security and privacy of robotics and autonomous systems, an area that CyLab is growing in collaboration with CMU’s Robotics Institute and other departments throughout the university. The Carnegie Bosch Institute (CBI) provided partial funding for two of the funded robotics projects.

“The seed projects we are funding this year explore approaches to mitigating misinformation, systems security, security and privacy for robotics, LLMs, and public policy issues,” said Lorrie Cranor, director of CyLab, and professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy Department.

“CyLab partners play a key role in transforming security and privacy research into practical solutions,” said Michael Lisanti, CyLab's senior director of partnerships. “Their support enables us to pursue ambitious projects that expand technical boundaries and address societal needs.”

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.

Robotics Projects

A Framework for Privacy-Aware Design of the Imaging Pipeline

• Aswin Sankaranarayanan - professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Lujo Bauer - professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Software and Societal Systems Department

ROSeMont: Security Monitoring and Adaptation for ROS-based Robots

• Bradley Schmerl - principal systems scientist, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Christopher Timperley - senior systems scientist, Software and Societal Systems Department

Secure and Safe FM-based Robotics using Constrained Decoding

• Eunsuk Kang - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Sebastian Scherer - associate research professor, Robotics Institute

Systematizing Privacy in Robotics

• Sarah Scheffler - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department, Engineering and Public Policy
• Norman Sadeh - professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Aswin Sankaranarayanan - professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Other Projects

An LLM-powered Social Laboratory for Mitigating Misinformation Spread, Polarization, and Social-media Induced Violence

• Osman Yağan - research professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Yuran Tian - Ph.D. candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Anonymous Remote US ID Verification and When to Use It

• Sarah Scheffler - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department, Engineering and Public Policy

Finding Date and Time Vulnerabilities with AI-Powered Differential Fuzzing

• Rohan Padhye - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department

Scale-Out Encrypted LLMs on GPUs

• Wenting Zheng - assistant professor, Computer Science Department
• Dimitrios Skarlatos - assistant professor, Computer Science Department

What Can Microarchitectural Weird Machines Do?

• Fraser Brown - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Riccardo Paccagnella - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Riad Wahby - assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering