Meet a Data Scientist-Selcuk Uluagac

The Meet a Data Scientist series is a chance to get up close and personal with top-level experts in a wide variety of fields that use data science.  The purpose of this series is to introduce our audience to the people behind the data, their lives, interests, career choices, their work,

and passion for how they can use data to solve grand challenges in their respective fields.  Join us as we peer behind the curtain and meet the data scientists behind the data!

On Thursday, April 8, 2021 (2:00-3:00 PM), IDSC is hosting the seventh session in the “Meet a Data Scientist” series with A. Selcuk Uluagac, PhD. Dr. Uluagac is currently a member of the Florida International University faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor, where he directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab (CSL).

Register Now |  Thursday, April 8, 2021, 2:00-3:00 PM

TALK TITLE: Security and Privacy of IoT Apps and Devices: A Machine Learning Perspective 

Cyberspace is expanding fast with the introduction of new Internet of Things (IoT) and CPS devices. Wearables, smartwatches, smart glasses, fitness trackers, medical devices, Internet-connected house appliances, and vehicles have grown exponentially in a short period of time. Given the increasingly critical nature of the cyberspace of these IoT devices and applications, it is imperative that they are secured against malicious activities. In this talk, Dr. Uluagac will introduce different current research projects in Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab (CSL) related to the security and privacy of IoT devices and applications, highlighting how different machine learning algorithms enabled impeccable results:

1. The first topic will introduce the sensory channel threats to CPS and IoT systems. Dr. Uluagac will discuss how using sensory channels (e.g., light, temperature, infrared), an adversary can successfully attack IoT/CPS applications and devices.
2. The second topic will introduce the design of a novel IoT device fingerprinting and identification framework to complement existing security solutions (e.g., authentication and access control) in identifying IoT devices (i.e., ensuring the devices are actually who they are).
3. The third topic will focus on how IoT devices deployed in smart settings (e.g., home, office) can leak sensitive information (events, activities) from different IoT apps and implementations even if the traffic is encrypted.
4. Dr. Uluagac will introduce a usable wearable-assisted continuous authentication framework where a wearable device (e.g., smartwatch) is used to authenticate a computer user continuously utilizing the motion sensors of the wearable.
5. Finally, he will share the CSL’s most recent work in detecting illegal bitcoin operations (i.e., cryptojacking), which uses machine learning techniques to accurately detect the presence of unwarranted cryptomining activity in real-time.

About Selcuk Ulugac

Before FIU, Dr. Uluagac was a Senior Research Engineer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Prior to Georgia Tech, he was a Senior Research Engineer at Symantec.

Dr. Uluagac earned his Ph.D. from the School of ECE at Georgia Institute of Technology. He also received an M.S. in Information Security from the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and a M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

His research is on security and privacy of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and he has hundreds of scientific/creative works in the practical and applied aspects of these areas.  In 2015, Dr. Uluagac received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which is NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. In 2015, he was awarded the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)’s Summer Faculty Fellowship. In 2016, he received the Summer Faculty Fellowship from the University of Padua (Università di Padova), Italy.

He is an active member of IEEE, ACM, and USENIX and a regular contributor to national panels and leading journals and conferences in the field. Dr. Uluagac has served on the program committees of top-tier security conferences such as IEEE S&P (Oakland), NDSS, ASIACCS, ACSAC, inter alia. He was the General Chair of ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (ACM WiSec) in 2019. He was the TPC Co-Chair of IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization & Software Defined Networks in 2016 and 2017 and IEEE International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems Security (CPS-Sec) in 2014-18, which he initiated. In 2018, he co-chaired the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Annual Expo and Conference, which is one of the largest events in the cyber education domain.

Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Communications and Surveys and Tutorials (network security lead area editor), and Elsevier Computer Networks. He has been very active in external funding efforts during his tenure at FIU on IoT and CPS security topics, and successfully been awarded competitive grants by US NSF, US Department of Energy, US Department of Labor, US Air Force Research Lab, Cyber Florida, Trend Micro, and Cisco.

He is very entrepreneurial and visionary with his research. Many of his research ideas have resulted in patents. And, he is very active in the local and national community; his research has been covered by different media outlets (TV, online, published) numerous times. More information can be obtained from: http://nweb.eng.fiu.edu/selcuk/

Mark your calendar for the next “Meet a Data Scientist” talk to be held on Zoom. These events are free and open to the public.

• Daniel Messinger 3:30-4:30 PM, Thursday, April 22, 2021 |  Register Now