In this talk, we will design and analyze "cool" algorithms (that are elegant and efficient) for simple practical problems yet of recreational nature. Emphasis will be given on fundamental concepts discussed in an interactive manner. Afterall the goal is to have fun!!

“... pleasure has probably been the main goal all along. But I hesitate to admit it, because computer scientists want to maintain their image as hard-working individuals who deserve high salaries. Sooner or later society will realize that certain kinds of hard work are in fact admirable even though they are more fun than just about anything else.” 

– Donald E. Knuth (Computer Scientist, Turing Award Winner, 1974

• Sajal K. Das, whose academic genealogy includes Thomas Alva Edison, is a professor of Computer Science and the Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, where he was the Chair of Computer Science Department during 2013-2017. He served the National Science Foundation as a Program Director in the Computer Networks and Systems division during 2008-2011. Prior to 2013, he was a University Distinguished Scholar Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and founding director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests include wireless and sensor networks, mobile and pervasive computing, UAVs, mobile crowdsensing, cyber-physical systems and IoT, smart environments (e.g., smart city, smart grid, smart transportation, smart agriculture, and smart health), distributed and cloud computing, cyber security, biological and social networks, and applied graph theory and game theory. He has made fundamental contributions to these areas and published extensively in high quality journals and refereed conference proceedings. He holds 5 US patents and coauthored 4 books– Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols, and Applications (John Wiley, 2005), Handbook on Securing Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructure: Foundations and Challenges (Morgan Kauffman, 2012), Mobile Agents in Distributed Computing and Networking (Wiley, 2012), and Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His h-index is 94 with more than 36,500+ citations according to Google Scholar. He is a recipient of 11 Best Paper Awards at prestigious conferences including ACM MobiCom and IEEE PerCom, and numerous awards for teaching, mentoring and research including the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to sensor networks, and University of Missouri System President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence. Dr. Das serves as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal, and as Associate Editor of several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. He has graduated 11 postdocs, 48 Ph.D. students, 31 MS theses, and numerous undergraduate research students. Dr. Das is an IEEE Fellow (class of 2015) and a recipient of 2021 Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

In his classic book Aircraft in Warfare, F. W. Lanchester discussed different types of warfare and presented equations, called the Lanchester equations, that can be used to model the results of battles between two forces of different sizes or capabilities. This paper introduces the Lanchester equations and provides a theoretical discussion leading to an analysis of the relative value of increasing the effectiveness of military assets vs. increasing the quantity of those assets. In particular, we show that increasing the effectiveness contributes only linearly to the power of a combatant, but increasing the quantity contributes quadratically. This talk also presents a Python script that models the Lanchester equations, together with a visualization demonstrating the effect of force concentration. The talk concludes with a discussion of the relevance of Lanchester’s equations to cyberwarfare, specifically to drone warfare and DDoS attacks. More generally, we provide a foundation for analyzing the tradeoff between quality and quantity in warfare.

Dr. George Markowsky is currently Professor of Computer Science at Missouri S&T. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University and a B. A. in Mathematics from Columbia University. He served as Chair of Computer Science at S&T, Chair and Professor of Computer Science and Chair of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Maine, a Visiting Scholar at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a Visiting Professor at the Lally School of Management and Technology at RPI, and Manager of Special Projects in the Computer Science Department at the IBM Watson Research Center in NY. 

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (or drones) can be used for a myriad of applications, such as search and rescue, precision agriculture, last-mile package delivery, etc. Interestingly, the cooperation between drones and ground vehicles (trucks) can even enhance the quality of service. In this talk, we will investigate the symbiosis between a truck and drones in the last-mile package delivery, introducing the Multiple Drone-Delivery Scheduling Problem (MDSP). From the main depot, a truck transports a team of drones for delivery of packages to the customers. Each delivery is associated with a drone's energy cost, a reward that characterizes the priority of the delivery, and a time interval representing the launch and rendezvous times from and to the truck. The objective of MDSP is to find an optimal scheduling for the drones that maximizes the overall reward subject to the drone's battery capacity while ensuring that the same drone performs deliveries whose time intervals do not intersect. After proving that MDSP is an NP-hard problem, we will devise an optimal solution based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP), a heuristic algorithm for the single drone case and two heuristics for the multiple drone case. We will compare the performance of our algorithms.

Federico Coro received his M.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Perugia, Italy, in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy, in 2019. From 2019 to 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Sapienza University Rome, Italy. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science at the Missouri University of Science and Technology University. His research interests include several aspects of theoretical computer science, including combinatorial optimization, network analysis, and the design and efficient implementation of drone algorithms.

As the generation of data becomes more prolific, the amount of time and computational resources necessary to perform analyses on these data increases. What is less well studied, however, is the data pre-processing steps that must be applied before any meaningful analysis can begin. This problem of taking data in some initial form and transforming it into a desired one is known as data integration, and it can be a substantial part of the overall computational load associated with data analytics.  Our group is exploring the execution of data integration via a range of compute engines, including Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Near-Memory Processing (NMP) architectures, and mixed-mode analog/digital systems. Applications are drawn from computational biology, scientific experiments (astrophysics and nuclear science), enterprise systems, image processing, graph processing, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Dr. Roger Chamberlain is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.  He completed his doctoral degree in computer science in 1989 from the same institution. He has served for a time as Associate Chair of the CSE Department and currently is serving as the director of the interdepartmental computer engineering program. Prof. Chamberlain teaches in the areas of digital systems, parallel processing, computer architecture, embedded systems, and reconfigurable logic. His research interests include specialized computer architectures for a variety of applications (e.g., astrophysics and biology), high-performance parallel and distributed application development, energy-efficient computation, and high-capacity I/O systems. Prof. Chamberlain has helped found a number of companies, he has over seventy patents issued both in the US and internationally, and he is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors.

Scalability is one of the key issues that hinder the widespread use of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, due to the underlying consensus algorithms for ensuring the security in a decentralized system. Recently, payment channel network (PCN) has been proposed as a promising off-chain solution. It allows instant and inexpensive payments by not requiring expensive and slow blockchain operations. However, to enable high-throughput transactions in PCNs, there are still many barriers to overcome, including transaction fee, node reliability, always-online requirement, balance depletion, and cryptocurrency utilization. In this talk, I will present some of our recent work on addressing these challenges. More specifically, I will first introduce two distributed algorithms for minimizing the transaction fee and providing robustness despite unreliable nodes, respectively. Next, I will demonstrate how to design smart contracts to deter the potential collusion in PCNs based on a game theoretic approach. Finally, I will share our thoughts on addressing other challenges.

Dr. Dejun (DJ) Yang is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Colorado School of Mines. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2013 and the B.S. degree in Computer Science from Peking University in 2007. His research interests include networking, blockchain, Internet of Things, and mobile sensing, with a focus on the application of game theory, optimization, algorithm design, and machine learning to resource allocation, security and privacy problems. He received the 2019 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize (only one of all the papers published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management in the previous three years) and Best Paper Awards at GLOBECOM, ICC (x2), and MASS, as well as a Best Paper Runner-Up at ICNP. He is currently an associate editor for the IEEE Internet of Things Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.

Physical layer security approaches have often used the hardness of blind deconvolution to achieve privacy when transmitting signals over unknown wireless channels.  Herein, we exploit the communication channel in a new way to provide a layer of privacy. In particular, we take advantage of the fact that it has been shown that exact recovery of block-sparse signals via linear measurements is achievable under conditions where classical compressed sensing would provably fail. We exploit this result to propose a novel private communication framework where secrecy is enhanced by transmitting instances of an unidentifiable compressed sensing problem over a public channel. The legitimate receiver can attempt to overcome this ill-posedness by leveraging secret knowledge of a block structure that is used to encode the transmitter's message. We study the privacy guarantees of this communication protocol in a variety of cases with the goal of understanding how often we need to refresh the shared secret between the transmitter and intended receiver.  Additionally, we propose an algorithm for an eavesdropper to learn the block structure via the method of moments and highlight the privacy benefits of this framework through numerical experiments.

[This is joint work with postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Maxime Ferreira Da Costa]

Dr. Urbashi Mitra received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Princeton University.  Dr. Mitra is currently the Gordon S. Marshall Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California with appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science. She was the inaugural Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-scale Communications. She has been a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society's Board of Governors (2002-2007, 2012-2017), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications and Networks (2012-2016), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Awards Board (2017-2018), and the Chair/Vice-Chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee (2017-2020).  Dr. Mitra is a Fellow of the IEEE.  She is the recipient of: the 2021 USC Viterbi School of Engineering Senior Research Award, the 2017 IEEE Women in Communications Engineering Technical Achievement Award, a 2015 UK Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Professorship, a 2015 US Fulbright Scholar Award, a 2015-2016 UK Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship, IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer, 2012 Globecom Signal Processing for Communications Symposium Best Paper Award, 2012 US National Academy of Engineering Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship, the 2009 DCOSS Applications & Systems Best Paper Award, 2001 Okawa Foundation Award, 2000 Ohio State University’s College of Engineering Lumley Award for Research, and a 1996 National Science Foundation CAREER Award.  She has been an Associate Editor for the following IEEE publications: Transactions on Signal Processing, Transactions on Information Theory, Journal of Oceanic Engineering, and Transactions on Communications.  Dr. Mitra has held visiting appointments at: King’s College, London, Imperial College, the Delft University of Technology, Stanford University, Rice University, and the Eurecom Institute. Her research interests are in wireless communications, structured statistical methods, communication and sensor networks, biological communication systems, detection and estimation and the interface of communication, sensing and control.   

Commonly used machine learning models are often trained on large datasets. As a result, a natural stumbling block in applying them more widely is the human effort required to label or annotate the data. Active learning is a framework that can reduce the number of labelled data needed to achieve a desired performance. In this talk, I will explain the benefit of active learning in two problem settings: active testing and active regression. In active testing, the sequential design of experiments developed by Chernoff in 1959 is widely used and known to be asymptotically optimal. We obtained a novel non-asymptotic bound on the number of labelled data needed for Chernoff’s algorithm. We will then look at an extension of the algorithm for active regression. In addition to obtaining a theoretical performance guarantee, we find that our extension requires fewer labelled data compared to existing methods in both simulated and real-world datasets.

Dr. Ardhendu Tripathy is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at Missouri S&T. He leads the Statistical Machine Learning Lab which provides a supportive and creative environment for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in current machine learning research. He received a research excellence award from Iowa State University for his PhD thesis on network coding for function computation.

While deep learning models have achieved great success, they are also vulnerable to potential manipulations, ranging from model inversion attacks that attempt to infer sensitive training data from trained models, to adversarial example attacks that create manipulated data instances to deceive a model. In this talk, I will present our recent work on achieving 1) differential privacy (DP) to ensure privacy of the training data and 2) certified robustness against adversarial examples for deep learning models. First, I will present a practical DP training framework with better empirical and theoretical utility (IJCAI’21) and an extended DP notion for more quantifiable protecting against model inversion attacks (BigData’20). Second, I will present a certified robustness approach via randomized smoothing for quantized neural networks (ICCV ’21). Finally, I will present a framework that kills two birds with one stone and achieves DP and certified robustness via randomized smoothing simultaneously.

Li Xiong is a Professor of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. She held a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship from 2015-2018. She has a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China. She and her research lab, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conduct research on the intersection of data management, machine learning, and data privacy and security. She has published over 170 papers and received six best paper (runner up) awards. She has served and serves as associate editor for IEEE TKDE, VLDBJ, IEEE TDSC, general or program co-chairs for ACM CIKM 2022, IEEE BigData 2020, and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018, 2020. Her research has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research), National Institute of Health (NIH), and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). She is also a recipient of Google Research Award, IBM Smarter Healthcare Faculty Innovation Award, Cisco Research Awards, AT&T Research Gift, and Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. She is an IEEE fellow and ACM distinguished member. More details at http://www. cs.emory.edu/~lxiong.

Federated Learning (FL) has received extensive attention from the research community because of its capability for privacy-preserving, collaborative learning from heterogeneous data sources. As the server cannot govern the clients’ actions, a nefarious client may attack the global model by sending malicious local gradients. Moreover, some clients, despite benign, may have unreliable data due to their heterogeneous hardware configurations and environments. Such unreliable clients can misguide the training process, resulting in a poorly fit model. Further, the performance disparities across clients in the presence of attacks have largely been unexplored.

This talk will first address the challenge of malicious client detection in federated learning under targeted and untargeted attacks. Additionally, we will introduce unreliable clients leading to another realistic yet challenging problem. As a solution, an innovative sequential approach will be proposed that will identify and mitigate the influence of both attackers and unreliable clients. Finally, we will introduce the problem of performance fairness and a solution to improve it across the clients.

Dr. Ashish Gupta is a Post-Doctoral Fellow working under the guidance of Prof. Sajal K. Das in the Computer Science department at Missouri S&T. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi in 2020. His research interests are in applied machine learning, sensor data analytics, and federated learning. He has published in reputed journals and conferences, such as IEEE TMC, IEEE TII, and IEEE TAI, IFIP Networking, IEEE INFOCOM, and ACM ICDCN. Currently, he is investigating federated learning through the adversarial lens and performance fairness perspective.

Feature selection is an important topic in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining. Despite being an extensively studied problem, most existing approaches assume that the feature selection is conducted offline, and all the features of instances are provided a priori during testing. Such assumptions may not always hold for real-world applications in which features arrive sequentially or it is expensive to access all features at the same time. For instance, in an online social network, millions of messages are exchanged between users, making it difficult to employ a standard feature selection technique to identify harassment messages in a timely, efficient, and scalable manner. In this talk, I will introduce a novel mathematical framework that sequentially selects the number of features and the order by which they are reviewed for each data instance, before stopping and proceeding with a decision about the data instance. The proposed framework is guaranteed to reach an accurate decision by reviewing the optimum least number of informative features. I will demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework on a variety of benchmark datasets and discuss extensions in regression settings and structured environments.

Daphney-Stavroula Zois is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her B.S. degree in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2007, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2010 and 2014, respectively. During 2014-2016, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the recipient of various fellowships and awards including the Viterbi Dean's graduate fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, and a Google AI for Social Good "Impact Scholars" award. She has served and is serving as Co–Chair, TPC member or reviewer in international conferences and journals, such as AAAI, ICLR, ICASSP, GlobalSIP, and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. Her research interests include decision making under uncertainty, machine learning, detection & estimation theory, intelligent systems design, and signal processing.

This talk is motivated by the problem of learning to design dynamic prices/incentives for demand management in safety-critical infrastructure systems such as the power grid. Faced with uncertainty regarding how customers will respond to posted prices, we highlight the need for safety-aware bandit optimization algorithms for designing prices that control the probability of violation of system constraints in spite of uncertainty. Then, in the first part of the talk, we discuss how we can manage safety constraints in admittedly simpler stochastic bandit problems with affine constraints and provide formal regret guarantees. In the second part of the talk, we discuss how our theoretical insights can be generalized for safe and efficient price design in our motivating example of dynamic pricing in power systems.

Dr. Mahnoosh Alizadeh is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (since January 2017). She received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2009 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California Davis in 2013 and 2014 respectively, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Her research is focused on the design of network control and optimization algorithms for cyber-physical systems, with a particular focus on renewable energy integration in the power grid and electric transportation systems. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.

Process sensors have no capability for passwords, multi-factor authentication, encryption, keys, signed certificates, etc.  Despite the lack of any cyber security, these devices are the 100% trusted input to OT networks and manual operation. Moreover, process sensors have no cyber forensics. We have a serious problem because the people responsible for the design and operation of equipment do not consider cyber security of interest, and the network security people who consider cyber security important do not consider process sensors or other engineering equipment important. Ironically on March 16, 2022 NIST issued NIST Special Publication 1800-10 Protecting Information and System Integrity in Industrial Control System Environments: Cybersecurity for the Manufacturing Sector. The NIST report states “It is acknowledged that many of the device cybersecurity capabilities may not be available in modern sensors and actuators.” Network cyber threats such as vulnerabilities in Log4j, the Treck TCP/IP Stack, and ransomware make off-line monitoring of process sensors more important than ever. This talk will present an overview of the current state of affairs in this important area.

Joseph Weiss is an industry expert on control systems and electronic security of control systems, with more than 40 years of experience in the energy industry. Mr. Weiss spent more than 14 years at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the first 5 years managing the Nuclear Instrumentation and Diagnostics Program. He was responsible for developing many utility industry security primers and implementation guidelines. Mr. Weiss serves as a member of numerous organizations related to control system security. He is also an invited speaker at many industry and vendor user group security conferences, has chaired numerous panel sessions on control system security, and is often quoted throughout the industry. He has published over 80 papers on instrumentation, controls, and diagnostics including chapters on cyber security for Electric Power Substations Engineering and Securing Water and Wastewater Systems. He coauthored Cyber Security Policy Guidebook and authored Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats. In February 2016, Mr. Weiss gave the keynote to the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on control system cyber security. Mr. Weiss has conducted SCADA, substation, nuclear and fossil plant control system, and water systems vulnerability and risk assessments and conducted short courses on control system security. The risk assessments include utility-scale solar farms and wind turbines. He has amassed a database of almost 12 million actual control system cyber incidents. He was a member of Transportation Safety Board Committee on Cyber Security for Mass Transit. He was a subject matter expert to the International Atomic Energy Agency on nuclear plant control system cyber security. Mr. Weiss has received numerous industry awards, including the EPRI Presidents Award (2002) and is an ISA Fellow, Managing Director of ISA Fossil Plant Standards, ISA Nuclear Plant Standards, ISA Industrial Automation and Control System Security (ISA99), a Ponemon Institute Fellow, and an IEEE Senior Member. He has been identified as a Smart Grid Pioneer by Smart Grid Today. He is a Voting Member of the TC65 TAG and a US Expert to TC65 WG10, Security for industrial process measurement and control – network and system security and IEC TC45A Nuclear Plant Cyber Security. Mr. Weiss was featured in Richard Clarke and RP Eddy’s book- Warning – Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. He has patents on instrumentation, control systems, and OT networks. He is a registered professional engineer in the State of California, a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC).

Website: www.controlglobal.com/unfettered

Non-Abelianess can be attributed to the hardness of many computational problems.  It also shows up when modeling certain quantum systems.  In some cases, it serves as an obstruction, creating barriers for efficient computational simulations. And yet, for others, non-Abelianess can be utilized, possibly developing more robust quantum computers. In this talk I will highlight three instances: 1) the non-Abelian hidden subgroup and the hidden shift problem and limitations of Fourier sampling, 2) propagation of quantum walks on non-abelian groups and their applications – some of our recent results, and 3) quest for non-Abelian anyons for building topological quantum computers. These topics span several areas including quantum physics, complexity theory, group theory etc. In the talk I will present the key insights at a high level and only a minimal knowledge in the above areas is assumed.

Avah Banerjee is an assistant professor in Computer Science at Missouri S&T. She received her PhD in Computer Science from George Mason University. Before joining Missouri S&T, she held a postdoctoral position at the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University. Broadly speaking, she works in the area of Theory and Algorithms. Her current interest includes quantum circuit compression and noise reduction and quantum algorithms for graph problems. She has publications in the following areas: random orders, graph reconfigurations, comparisons tree complexity, and evolutionary algorithms. She was a recipient of the Dean’s fellowship from George Mason University.

Cybersecurity and cyber forensic readiness are vital parts of intelligent integrated and interconnected energy systems coupled with demand-oriented city infrastructures, governance models and services that foster energy sustainability. This talk will provide an overview of the RESPONSE project, which is funded by the European Union, and which aims to create a strategic vision for climate-neutral smart cities by 2050. He will also speak about the European Union-funded ELECTRON project, which aims to deliver a new generation of electrical power systems that can respond to cyber, privacy, and data attacks. This project makes use of decentralized, federated learning. Dr. Kotsiuba will also discuss the CIBOK framework that helps defenders deal with cybercrime.

Dr. Igor Kotsiuba has served for more than a decade in industry and academia and has completed numerous transnational projects with leading players in Cybersecurity and Industrial IoT. He is a counsellor in government and industry and the founder of the cybersecurity company iSolutions, which has established a digital forensics lab in Ukraine to build capacity and restore the rule of law in cyberspace. Dr. Kotsiuba is an evangelist for an inclusive approach to delivering full-stack cybersecurity managed services ranging from initial compromise assessments to digital forensics evidence verifications. He has been advising Ukrainian Businesses and Governmental Institutions on cybersecurity issues. In 2018 he was elected Head of the Cybersecurity Work Group of the American Chamber of Commerce, Ukraine. He received his Ph.D. from the Pukhov Institute for Modeling Energy Engineering (PIMEE) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The title of his dissertation is Information Technology for Cybersecurity of Energy Grids.