Nathan Kahl

NSF grant supports nanofabrication workforce training

Nathan Kahl — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 22:43:45 +0000

NSF grant supports nanofabrication workforce training Nathan Kahl Sat, 09/13/2025 - 18:43

�鶹��Ƶ faculty members received nearly $1 million in a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a program providing hands-on nanofabrication training and education to people seeking a career change.

The funding comes under NSF’s ExLENT Pivots track and will serve the national interest by expanding experiential learning pathways in emerging hardware technologies driven by nanofabrication. It focuses on increasing workforce opportunities in Northern Virginia, a region positioned for growth in emerging technology sectors, such as artificial intelligence hardware, quantum information science, data center engineering, and sustainable manufacturing.

Ahn's research focus is nanofabrication. Photo by Office of University Branding

“The most important term is ‘experiential,' and it’s rare for NSF to provide this kind of funding," said Ethan Ahn, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a founding director of �鶹��Ƶ Nanoelectronics Laboratory, who is the lead principal investigator (PI) on the project. "The idea here is to produce this workforce for very high tech-focused areas by applying the learning-by-doing model.”

George �鶹��Ƶ is already known as one of the commonwealth's largest producers of tech talent.

The program provides an opportunity for working professionals who are looking to change careers; even those with no STEM background are encouraged to apply, as suggested by the “pivot” track from NSF.

“We’ll take people regardless of their background, education, or readiness," said Ahn. "We’ll provide everything they need to be job-ready by training participants with both lab and soft skills, providing connections with industry, and, if hired, paying them during their summer employment."

Co-PI Jessica Rosenberg, professor of physics and director of education at George �鶹��Ƶ’s Quantum Science and Engineering Center, said, “Nanofabrication is important for a range of high-tech industries, including semiconductors, biomedical, and energy. We’re creating a program to provide the support, education, and training needed for individuals to get a job in this growing sector. It will help them meet their goals while also supporting a regional talent pipeline.”

The program will run for three years, with approximately 20 participants every year. A key component of the initial phase of the program is access to a mobile app used for virtual training. The team is developing the app because they recognize that participants may have existing responsibilities that make coming to campus a challenge. After participants complete this first phase on their own schedule, they will then go to campus to participate in a research lab for the hands-on portions of the program.

Jessica Rosenberg is director of education at George �鶹��Ƶ's Quantum Science and Engineering Center. Photo by Office of University Branding

Ahn said a particularly interesting element of the program is a guaranteed interview in the industry. They are already working with BAE Systems, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman and expect this number of companies participating to grow through a collaboration with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. "The hope is that the participants will be able to turn the opportunity into a full-time position,” he said.

George �鶹��Ƶ will give program participants microcredentials, competency-based qualifications indicating a mastery of a subject, as they complete each phase of the program. This opportunity’s timing is ideal for Virginians looking to make a career change and supports the university’s efforts in building Virginia’s high-tech workforce.

Ahn was inspired to apply for the funding in part by the fact that the new Innovation District, a 3,800-acre area of Prince William County anchored by George �鶹��Ƶ’s Science and Technology Campus, co-locates the university with industry and government to create a dynamic collaboration model.

“Relationships between university and industry are common, but this also includes government,” said Ahn. “We already have this established network via the Innovation District and in my proposal I said we are going to focus on nanofabrication, which is my area of expertise. I think those things made it appealing to NSF.”

Jill Nelson, professor and associate dean for undergraduate programs, and Nathalia Peixoto, associate professor, both in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are also PI's on the grant.

The program will welcome its first cohort in spring 2026.

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Ethan Ahn

Learn more about Research at George �鶹��Ƶ

Topics

Nanofabrication Facility

Innovation District

National Science Foundation

Micro-credentialing

Quantum Science and Engineering Center

Research

College of Science

Science and Technology Campus

workforce

College of Engineering and Computing

Dialing up new 9-1-1 training with AI

Nathan Kahl — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:34:13 +0000

Dialing up new 9-1-1 training with AI Nathan Kahl Tue, 09/09/2025 - 14:34

In This Story

Hemant Purohit

Karina Korostelina

�鶹��Ƶ’s Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities (C-RASC) is working with the Fairfax County Department of Public Safety Communications (DPSC) to implement artificial intelligence (AI) and possibly forever change the way 9-1-1 operators are trained.

Funded by a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), C-RASC started working with Fairfax’s DPSC in 2024. The goal was to implement AI to improve the resiliency of the county’s emergency response system, using AI to assist 9-1-1 operators by answering calls.

But Kathy Laskey, professor emerita of Systems Engineering and Operations Research, said, “There are all kinds of legal and other sticky issues with putting AI on the phone with people calling 9-1-1.” The researchers pivoted quickly. “The DPSC told us that where they could use help is training, because operators need a lot of practice in taking calls before they actually respond to real callers.”

Hemant Purohit, Monika Bochert (NIST), and Lin Wells impressed the Public Safety Innovation Summit Conference attendees with the new technology. Photo provided.

Training is very labor-intensive in a 9-1-1 call center, and typically an instructor will play the role of a 9-1-1 caller and improvise a call scenario from a large scenario booklet, with the trainee responding and getting feedback on the responses they give.

The Conversational AI-assisted Scenario Training System developed by the George �鶹��Ƶ faculty together with industry partners and guided by DPSC is very sophisticated in generating realistic scenario calls and is customizable.

“Trained in part on the scenario booklet being fed into this AI system, the scenario narration by the voicebot is done in such a way that it mimics a wide range of typical caller behavior,” said Hemant Purohit, associate professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology and director of the Humanitarian Informatics Lab.

Lin Wells, executive advisor to C-RASC, added, “Each caller may have a different situation, and the training staff helped us identify those variables in terms of the components they want trainees to practice.”

The project team is enhancing the system in several ways. One is by incorporating various difficulty levels so the system can be used both for new employees and as a refresher for existing staff. Another is to add realism, such as the sounds of passing cars in a scenario involving a traffic accident. Another enhancement is to include diverse speech patterns, such as accents, different tones of voice, language, and other real-world challenges the operators face.

Purohit said the team recently attended the NIST Public Safety Innovation Summit Conference (5 x 5) in Seattle and got a very positive response to the technology. A 9-1-1 communications and training coordinator from another state, who had 27 years of work in public safety and received this year’s award at the conference, said the technology was the best she had seen.

Laskey added that Fairfax County also has been very supportive of the work. “I taught at George �鶹��Ƶ for 32 years, and I've worked on a lot of research projects. I've never before in my life demonstrated a software project to a client where the recipients applauded when we were done.”

Perhaps the most important endorsement of all came from the 9-1-1 training instructors, who were impressed with how well the AI callers mimicked real-life situations and how this could save them hours of training.

The other project team members include Paul Houser, professor and executive director of C-RASC, and Karina Korostelina, professor and director of the Sustainable Peace Lab at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. Korostelina is leading the project’s community engagement study, which has involved interviews with Fairfax County citizens. Her findings showed the barriers to effective 9-1-1 services include language, delays with interpreter access, limited public understanding of emergency-vs.-non-emergency use, rigid questioning protocols, human error, and the need for more experience in handling mental health crises.

“The increase in adaptive capacity of new technologies requires deep considerations for micro-dynamics of identity and power in communities,” said Korostelina. “To build this capacity as a part of community resilience, the project will codesign the systemic approach for community engagement, including public education campaigns using schools, libraries, media, and community workshops to teach the difference between emergency and non-emergency calls and how to conduct emergency calls more efficiently.”

The project team is supported by doctoral students Ramya S. Nayaka and Hamad Edhah Yaslam Aldhlea from the College of Engineering and Computing and the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution respectively, as well as industry partners OmniBot Advisors and BlueHorse Digital.

In addition to working with Fairfax County on a possible continuation of the project the group is exploring academic-industry partnerships and preparing to discuss possibilities for commercialization with the university’s Office of Technology Transfer.

Topics

AI and human factors

Emergency Management

Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities

National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST

Research

Artificial Intelligence

Bluetooth blues? George �鶹��Ƶ turns a bug into a big win

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 01:28:32 +0000

Bluetooth blues? George �鶹��Ƶ turns a bug into a big win Nathan Kahl Wed, 08/20/2025 - 21:28

�鶹��Ƶ College of Engineering and Computing faculty members made a significant impact at the 2025 USENIX Security Conference, in Seattle, including winning the Distinguished Artifact Award.

Photo provided

“Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges,” a paper by the Department of Computer Science’s PhD student Junming Chen, PhD candidate Xiaoyue Ma, and Lannan Luo and Qiang Zeng, both associate professors, won the prestigious Distinguished Artifact Award, which was granted to only six of the 2,385 submitted papers.

Their research demonstrated how to turn Bluetooth devices into a trackable "AirTags" without requiring root privileges. The research revealed a vulnerability in Apple's Find My Network that can leverage more than a billion active Apple devices as unwitting finders. The high-quality artifact with its complete documentation and practical implementation provides researchers with an invaluable toolkit for evaluating tracking vulnerabilities in crowd-sourced location networks. Their work was previously reported by the university and received media attention in various outlets.

A crowd gathers at the team's poster session. Photo provided.

USENIX Security is one of the country’s premier cybersecurity conferences, and this year received 2,385 paper submissions with a 17% acceptance rate. The following George �鶹��Ƶ research papers were also accepted at USENIX this year. 

Rowhammer-Based Trojan Injection: One Bit Flip Is Sufficient for Backdooring DNNs
Xiang Li, Ying Meng, Junming Chen, Lannan Luo, and Qiang Zeng, �鶹��Ƶ

DISPATCH: Unraveling Security Patches from Entangled Code Changes
Shiyu Sun and Yunlong Xing, �鶹��Ƶ; Xinda Wang, University of Texas at Dallas; Shu Wang, Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Qi Li, Tsinghua University; Kun Sun, �鶹��Ƶ

TYPEPULSE: Detecting Type Confusion Bugs in Rust Programs
Hung-Mao Chen and Xu He, �鶹��Ƶ; Shu Wang, �鶹��Ƶ and Palo Alto Networks Inc.; Xiaokuan Zhang and Kun Sun, �鶹��Ƶ

LLMmap: Fingerprinting for Large Language Models
Dario Pasquini, RSAC Labs; Evgenios M. Kornaropoulos and Giuseppe Ateniese, �鶹��Ƶ

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Qiang Zeng

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A calibration from campus to the cosmos

Nathan Kahl — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 14:48:15 +0000

A calibration from campus to the cosmos  Nathan Kahl Fri, 08/15/2025 - 10:48

In This Story

Peter Pachowicz

�鶹��Ƶ is the home of the $20 million Landolt NASA Space Mission, placing a satellite that will serve as an artificial “star” in orbit around the Earth…and College of Engineering and Computing students are instrumental in the payload’s construction. It’s experience that not only significantly bolsters a resume, but also allows students to work on a project of their dreams.  

Fatima Bahzad, a computer science graduate student said, “It’s the most fun I’ve ever had in school.”  

Bahzad said that working on the mission is the most fun she's had at George �鶹��Ƶ. Photo provided.

Bahzad explained her role: “The satellite, which is about the size of a bread box, is comprised of layers and each layer has a chip and the chips need to talk to each other. There’s also a primary chip that sends commands to all of them. I’m working on the communication between the chips.”

Getting an opportunity to turn theory into practice is incredibly gratifying, she said. “Learning theoretical stuff is one thing, but applying it is another. This is one of the first opportunities I’ve had to work on something ‘real.’” 

The payload is being built in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with whom the teams checks in frequently. The artificial star will allow scientists to calibrate telescopes and more accurately measure the brightness of stars ranging from those nearby to the distant explosions of supernova in far-off galaxies. By establishing absolute flux calibration, the mission will address several open challenges in astrophysics, including the speed and acceleration of the universe expansion. 

On the engineering side, the project is led by Piotr Pachowicz, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Pachowicz brought PhD student Jay Deorukhkar, one of his advisees, onto the project.  

Deorukhkar said he’s been working on testing the individual payload modules. These will later integrate with the satellite bus, which is the core structure and support system that is separate from the specific payload. Reliability of small satellite buses against radiation effects is also the subject of his dissertation, making this work particularly relevant.  

Deorukhkar is working on his second project that will send an object into space. Photo provided.

“My role as an engineer is to help design, prototype, and test specific payload components. We’re early in the design stage, working towards the preliminary design review of our payload.” He added, “The great thing about this project is really the end-to-end experience, from the inception of the mission  to the actual launch and operation of the science payload.”  

Deorukhkar has some experience with that, having worked on the ThinSat project in 2021, which sent a small satellite into low earth orbit. He knows about the anxiety as the launch date nears. “It's a bone-chilling moment when the rocket starts and you know your device is on there and it’s out of your hands at that point. You can only pray and trust that everything you've learned and you've done just works.”  

Bahzad is still trying to keep her feet planted on the ground, so to speak, at times overwhelmed to be part of something so significant. “We met recently with some people from NASA and I was just sitting in the corner and couldn’t believe it. I was just thinking, ‘This is so cool!’”   

Housed in the George �鶹��Ƶ College of Science, the mission launches in 2029, when the artificial star will orbit earth 22,236 miles up, far enough away to look like a star to telescopes back on Earth. This orbit also allows it to move at the same speed of the Earth’s rotation, keeping it in place over the United States during its first  year in space. 

�鶹��Ƶ faculty and students will work together with nine other organizations beyond NASA and NIST on this first-of-its-kind project for a university in the Washington, D.C., area. 

Topics

Space

Electrical and Computer Engineering

satellite

NASA

National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST

Students

One tiny flip that opens a backdoor in AI

Nathan Kahl — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:13:32 +0000

One tiny flip that opens a backdoor in AI Nathan Kahl Mon, 08/11/2025 - 09:13

A self-driving motor vehicle is cruising along, its numerous sensors and cameras telling it when to brake, change lanes, and make turns. The vehicle approaches a stop sign at a high rate of speed, but instead of stopping, it barrels through, causing an accident. The problem will probably never be found by investigators, but instead of reading the stop sign as a stop sign, the car had been hacked to see it instead as a speed limit sign.

According to research by �鶹��Ƶ’s Qiang Zeng, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, and PhD student Xiang Li and colleagues, it is remarkably simple for a would-be hacker to pull off such a feat.

“An attacker can selectively flip only one bit, and this changing of the bit from 0 to 1 allows an attacker to attach a patch onto any image and fool the AI system. Regardless of the original image input, that patched image will be interpreted as the attacker’s desired result,” said Zeng.

So, if the hacker wants an artificial intelligence (AI) system to see a stop sign as something else, or a cat as a dog, the effort is minimal. Consider a scene potentially pulled from a Mission: Impossible movie, where a corporate spy can pass himself off as a CEO, gaining access to sensitive information.

Zeng and colleagues presented a paper with the findings at USENIX Security 2025, one of the nation’s premier cybersecurity conferences.

AI systems have what’s called a deep neural network (DNN) as a key component. DNNs let AI handle complex data and perform many different tasks. They work by using numerical values, called weights, each typically stored in 32 bits. There are hundreds of billions of bits in a DNN, so changing only one is particularly stealthy, according to Zeng.

“Once the attacker knows the algorithm, then it can take literally only a couple minutes to make the change. And you won’t realize you’ve been attacked because the AI system will work as usual. Flipping one bit effectively sneaks a backdoor into AI, exploitable only by those who know the patch,” he said.

Prior work in this area typically added a patch tailored to the original image—for example, modifying a stop sign specifically so that it is misclassified as a 65 mph speed limit sign. This new research uses what’s called a uniform patch that works regardless of the original input; the hacker could cause the system to interpret various signs as a speed limit sign. This input-agnostic attack represents a newer and more dangerous threat.

When they began the project the researchers wanted to learn the minimum level of effort needed to launch such an attack, recognizing that flipping hundreds of bits is impractical and gets exponentially difficult. “It turned out, we only needed to flip one,” Zeng said with a laugh. The team named their attacking system, appropriately, OneFlip.

The researchers are now only looking at the implication for images, as image classifiers are among the most popular AI systems, though they suspect this hacking technique could also work for things like speech recognition. Zeng said that their success rate during testing was near 100% and stressed that all DNN systems are likely to be subject to such hacking.

This does not necessarily mean such hacking will run rampant. To launch the attack, Zeng said, there are two requirements: access to the exact weights (numerical values that the model learns during training of the AI system) and the ability to execute code on the machine hosting the model. For example, in cloud environments, attackers might exploit shared infrastructure where multiple tenants’ programs run on the same physical hardware.

Learn about AI at George �鶹��Ƶ

Topics

Cyber Security

Cyber Security Research

computer science

Autonomous Cars

Artificial Intelligence

Research

I-Corps in 3D: Streaming toward better telehealth

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:19:57 +0000

I-Corps in 3D: Streaming toward better telehealth Nathan Kahl Thu, 07/17/2025 - 10:19

In This Story

Bo Han

A team in �鶹��Ƶ’s Computer Science Department is taking part in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) I-Corps program to study the effectiveness of 3D streaming in telehealth environments.

Bo Han, an associate professor of computer science and expert in computer networks and security and privacy, received $50,000 for his project, Translation Potential of Next Generation Telepresence Enriched by Immersive Technologies. Nan Wu, the entrepreneurial lead on the team, said, “The idea is to build a system for immersive telepresence over the internet. It’s essentially a 3D video stream but the technical improvement is how it saves bandwidth by using user-motion prediction and content sampling, improving the quality of the experience.”

3D telehealth services may help remote patients in urgent need of care. iStock photo.

Wu explained that the technical adjustment is made based on the receiver’s movements. “Since I’m looking at the front side of you, the streaming only needs to send me the front side, not the back. I don’t need to see all around you, even though it’s 3D. Moreover, when you’re farther away, a lower-resolution stream is enough since I won’t notice the difference. And if you’re hidden behind other content, there’s no need in sending what I can’t see.”

I-Corps is, according to the NSF website, “an immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact. This seven-week experiential training program prepares scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the university laboratory—accelerating the economic and societal benefits of NSF-funded and other basic research projects that are ready to move toward commercialization.”

Since the program began in 2012, I-Corps has ushered 2,500 teams, and nearly 1,400 of them launched startups that cumulatively raised $3.16 billion in subsequent funding.

A portion of the I-Corps mentoring is devoted to customer discovery. Teams must interview at least 100 potential customers to determine market interest. According to Wu, the team didn’t find a robust market for using the technology the way they initially envisioned because staff shortages is the biggest pain point in the field, not technical shortcomings. “We thought nurses could monitor patients in 3D and save time, but there are many AI tools already doing that, monitoring 40 patients at once,” he said.

Wu said they’ve shifted to using the technology emergency situations, believing the tools will be useful in high-pressure trauma care or emergency cases. “We are thinking of a situation where there is a remote expert connected to a patient in a rural area, for example, where there is no expert on site.” Wu said that more interviews are needed to determine the market demand for such use.

Topics

Telehealth

I-Corps

National Science Foundation

immersive technologies

Research

Solo soaring success: Four students take important step in aviation training

Nathan Kahl — Tue, 27 May 2025 19:29:34 +0000

Solo soaring success: Four students take important step in aviation training Nathan Kahl Tue, 05/27/2025 - 15:29

In This Story

John Shortle

Four �鶹��Ƶ students in the aviation flight training and management minor took to the skies recently for a solo flight, the final step in completing requirements for the program.

Zaki in the air. Photo provided.

Allyson Bautista, Laila Elbaddaly, Makary Meseha, and George Zaki each piloted a small plane for approximately 30 minutes with no one else in the craft with them, an accomplishment that is a significant step toward a career in aviation.

Three of the students had existing exposure to the industry prior to taking on the minor, which requires 15 additional credits and classes such as SYST 460 Introduction to Air Traffic Control, including the flight training leading up to the solo flight. Elbaddaly works for Lufthansa Cargo, handling import and export tracking for multiple airlines. Her workspace at Dulles Airport is near where Meseha, who told her about the program, works for Emirates Airline. Bautista works for Aero Elite, a flight training school, as a flight dispatcher.

Were the aspiring aviators antsy as they ascended? Elbaddaly said, somewhat jokingly, “The only thing in my mind was, ‘What if I can’t land right? Will I be stuck in the air forever?’”

Maseha readies for lift-off. Photo provided.

Despite a fear of heights, Meseha reported being confident in his attempt, while Bautista said, “The day before, I was absolutely shaking in my boots. I could not believe my instructor was trusting me with that plane.”

Zaki had a hiccup leading up to lift-off. “The day before I flew for six hours, so I was tired when we did our stage check (an evaluation a flight instructor does of a student) and then I did almost everything wrong, so I was hesitant about the solo. On the day of, my instructor said, 'Look, I want to see three consistent patterns (loops around the airport) and I will get out of the plane,’ and I did 14 consecutive patterns very well. That’s when I knew I was ready for my solo flight.”

Elbaddaly pilots the plane. Photo provided.

For many of the pilots, the interest in aviation began at a young age. Bautista became curious when she was in high school and said, “I'm a travel geek, so I travel a lot and I was flying to Japan in 2022. When I got onto the plane I looked up at the cockpit and I thought, ‘I want to be in the front of this plane, up there.'” She said that women pilots—and particularly Asian ones (she is Filipina)—represent a tiny portion of the total population, and she’d like to increase representation for her demographic.

Meseha also wanted to fly from a young age, but cited the cost of continuing with the training and education and the disruptive schedule as reasons he might choose to work as a mechanical engineer and not a pilot.

To continue their studies, the next step is to log more hours and complete what is called a “cross country” flight, which, unlike what the name suggests, is only required to cover 50 nautical miles.

"It is quite an accomplishment to complete the solo flight test," said Systems Engineering and Operations Resarch chair, John Shortle. "It takes dedication, discipline and perseverance. We are very proud of the students that have achieved this milestone. George �鶹��Ƶ is glad to address the nation-wide airline pilot and air traffic controller shortage through this excellent program."

Topics

Aviation

air travel

Systems Engineering and Operations Research

innovative classes

Students

AI4Defense develops DoD-driven smart solutions

Nathan Kahl — Fri, 23 May 2025 11:20:18 +0000

AI4Defense develops DoD-driven smart solutions Nathan Kahl Fri, 05/23/2025 - 07:20

Kammy Sanghera, executive director of global engagements and tech talent development and a professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology at �鶹��Ƶ, received a grant from the Griffiss Institute to lead the AI4Defense program—an innovative incubator that empowers high school and early undergraduate students to explore artificial intelligence (AI) applications in national defense.

Funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the grant supports AI4Defense, a month-long, hands-on experience designed to immerse students in real-world problem-solving. Participants collaborate with mission partners—including the Department of Defense (DoD) and agencies such as the Space Force and the Defense Digital Service—to develop AI-driven solutions to national security challenges.

The Griffiss Institute, a leading STEM accelerator for the DoD and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), help expand the program's reach and impact. “A very important element happened last year,” said Sanghera. “DIU joined forces with the same mindset—build the talent pipeline, engage mission partners to solve real-world problems, and use AI to create efficient and secure solutions. These three elements were perfect for the design of the program.”'

Students at the 2024 AI4Defense event. Photo provided.

With support from academic and industry mentors, the program has grown into a public–private partnership that Sanghera and her team aim to scale further this summer. Students not only gain technical and communication skills but also engage in customer discovery—working directly with mission partners to define problems and tailor AI solutions accordingly.

In 2024, one student team developed a proof-of-concept AI agent for the U.S. Air Force to automate the creation of Self-Assessment Checklists (SACs). Traditionally a manual and time-intensive process due to regulatory complexity and frequent updates, the AI solution was able to extract key phrases from regulations and generate relevant questions, significantly improving the speed, accuracy, and consistency of SAC creation.

Sanghera emphasized the program’s multilevel impact: George �鶹��Ƶ undergraduate and graduate students served as mentors to high school participants, gaining leadership experience and exposure to the defense innovation ecosystem.

“Many of our graduate students are international students, so it was also a valuable opportunity to work alongside early undergraduate students and with unclassified data and explore career pathways in the defense sector,” Sanghera said.

The Defense Department strategy for AI adoption. Photo credit Department of Defense.

The program was promoted across Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Loudoun County public schools and culminated in a final symposium. Students pitched their AI solutions to a panel of judges, received feedback, and were recognized with awards. Several teams chose to continue collaborating with their mission partners beyond the summer program.

This year's program began in June, and Sanghera is enthusiastic about the possibilities. “We’re excited to see what creative, impactful solutions students bring forward.”

Associate Professor Mihai Boicu—Co-PI with Sanghera on the AI4Defense initiative—lead efforts to guide students in presenting their work through a continuing research lens. He also oversees the development of peer-reviewed publications based on students’ projects, which will be cataloged as part of the program’s scholarly output and shared broadly to promote AI learning and innovation in future cohorts.

Sanghera and Boicu will continue collaborating with Caitlin Bowers, a Defense Innovation Faculty Fellow at George �鶹��Ƶ. Together, Sanghera’s strategic vision, Boicu’s research expertise, and Bowers’ experience in defense innovation projects form a strong team that will provide students with the opportunity to gain practical skills and apply them to real-world challenges relevant to the defense sector.

In This Story

Kamaljeet Sanghera

Mihai Boicu

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U.S. Department of Defense

Research

Artificial Intelligence

K-12 Partnerships

Defense and Security

Blast breakthroughs from Brazil bolster international engineering collaboration

Nathan Kahl — Wed, 21 May 2025 12:14:20 +0000

Blast breakthroughs from Brazil bolster international engineering collaboration Nathan Kahl Wed, 05/21/2025 - 08:14

In This Story

A long-standing partnership between the Brazilian Air Force and �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Engineering and Computing is supporting a visiting PhD student’s investigation into explosion research, and enabling faculty to gather data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

Anselmo da Silva Augusto, a Brazilian Air Force major, is working with Girum Urgessa, an expert in structural engineering and mechanics, in what Urgessa calls a win-win partnership. “We provide the technical advice and mentorship and gather invaluable data from the tests Anselmo has been conducting,” said Urgessa.

This ongoing collaboration has yielded rapid results, with three peer-reviewed journal papers and five conference papers to be presented in the United States, Brazil, and Portugal.

The results of the blast, which can be digitally sent from Brazil to Anselmo. Photo provided.

Augusto is a trained civil engineer now pursuing his doctorate, who for nearly 20 years has focused on building protection. His military work led him to study explosives—specifically, how to best protect structures against blasts. The Brazilian Air Force sent him abroad, as part of a partnership with universities worldwide, where their service members study for one year.

Urgessa, a professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, was happy to host him, having met Augusto during a previous visit to Brazil, where Urgessa was a keynote speaker at an international defense symposium.

Augusto’s work examines how steel sheets respond to near-field blasts and investigates protective systems, such as elastomers, rubber-like polymers that stretch. The technical and safety requirements make these tests impossible to conduct at George �鶹��Ƶ.

“You need to be far from urban areas, and you must have appropriate protocol for the safe handling of explosives,” said Augusto, describing the challenges of setting off an explosive roughly the size of an apple. “Also, there are several people involved, including safety experts, engineers, and technicians.”

High-speed cameras record the explosions, allowing the researchers to see the detonation in detail. “With the camera, recording at 10,000 frames per second, we are able to see the sheet deforming, which happens in about one millisecond.”

The team working in Brazil scans the damaged sheets and sends the data to Augusto, who 3D prints a replica, a completely accurate, small-scale version of the results that he can hold in his hands.

Augusto and Urgessa are using the findings to inform best practices for retrofitting structures against human-induced or accidental explosions. “If you have an existing historical building, you can apply this protective material to enhance its capacity," Augusto said. Or, in other applications, you may have a tank or a military vehicle that needs to be as light as possible and use different types of polymer composites for better protection.”

Urgessa said, “When we think about new construction, having this information helps to determine safe stand-off distances. It supports site planning decisions. We can't predict the exact magnitude of the next threat, but field-scale tests supplemented by computational models help us design resilient and secure structures.”

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civil and infrastructure engineering

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College of Engineering and Computing

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CEIE Success Stories

George �鶹��Ƶ and CodeLock work on securing the software supply chain

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 15 May 2025 11:27:25 +0000

George �鶹��Ƶ and CodeLock work on securing the software supply chain Nathan Kahl Thu, 05/15/2025 - 07:27

�鶹��Ƶ Department of Information Sciences and Technology Professor Kun Sun received a grant from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) of Northern Virginia to collaborate with CodeLock, Inc., a Virginia-based technology company specializing in software security. The grant totals $75,000 for one year and is part of CCI’s Academic Support for Cybersecurity Entrepreneurship and Next-Gen Development (ASCEND) Fund. 

“The idea for this funding is to partner a startup company with university subject matter experts,” said Sun. “The focus of this grant is to build a platform that connects startups with academic experts to solve technical industry challenges.”  

The project will integrate Sun’s previous research on automated security patching with CodeLock’s technology for secure software supply chain using dynamically generated digital signatures to develop solutions that address vulnerabilities in source code. 

The CCI is Virginia’s main access point for cybersecurity research, innovation, workforce development. Image courtesy CCI.

CodeLock offers a cybersecurity platform designed to secure software development processes by providing real-time monitoring, compliance automation, and protection against insider threats and supply chain attacks. It creates a forensic chain of custody by linking every code change to its developer, ensuring transparency and integrity throughout the software development lifecycle.  
 
“So for software supply chain security we install outside software applications on our smartphones and computers, for example,” said Sun. “That software may rely on  other software and we have this term, SBOM, which means software bill of material. It says that we need to know what other dependent software is used and can we trust that software? If you install software, you need to verify it has not been manipulated or modified by an attacker.” Sun will apply his 10+ years of research on automatic software vulnerability detection and automated program repair. 

“The vast majority of software supply chain attacks begin with compromised credentials—something traditional security tools are ill-equipped to prevent,” said CodeLock CEO Brian Gallagher. “By enforcing zero-trust authentication at the developer level and linking that identity to a tamper-proof chain of custody, CodeLock is fundamentally reshaping the threat landscape. Partnering with George �鶹��Ƶ allows us to build on that foundation by automating vulnerability patching, which not only strengthens security but also delivers measurable cost savings for our customers. This collaboration accelerates our mission to bring transparency, accountability, and efficiency to software development across both government and commercial sectors.”

The project team will get feedback from CodeLock’s existing customers and collaborate with CCI and the Northern Virginia Technology Council to refine the solution for broader commercial adoption. Additional funding will be provided by CodeLock and supplemented through grant opportunities. 

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Kun Sun

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Cybersecurity

software

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI)

Research

Nathan Kahl

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