Students present emerging research at IISP virtual Cybersecurity Demo Day
On September 24th, 2020, the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) presented the virtual Demo Day Finale, a signature event that brings together faculty, students, and industry leaders to explore emerging cybersecurity innovation at Georgia Tech. The Finale was the culmination of the Demo Day Program which spanned eight months and was designed to help students consider the commercialization aspects of their research.
IISP Executive Director Wenke Lee welcomed the audience, and Raheem Beyah, VP of interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech, led an exciting day of student presentations.
Seven student teams, four from the commercialization track and three from the research track, presented compelling research making it a tough decision for the judges.
The expert judge panel included Blake Patton, managing partner and founder, Tech Square Ventures; Jerry Perullo, CISO at Intercontinental Exchange; and John Schanz, senior advisor, TDF Ventures.
Commercialization Track Winner:
Ramanan was awarded the commercialization track award for Blockalytics: Decentralized Cloudless Platform. “We were able to get validation from completely independent set of experts,” said Ramanan. “They were not researchers or data scientists, but they were able to see the idea for what it is and grasp it, which really gave us a lot of encouragement and validation.”
Research Track Winner:
Ike took home the research track award for his work on FORECAST-- a post-detection technique that enables analysts responding to a cyber-attack to automatically predict malware capabilities which may be staged for execution. “Most of the time in academia we do things that are theoretical and abstract but knowing that the judges think my research is important to the IT community gives me the confidence to do more,” he said. “Anyone who goes through the process of Demo Day would benefit from the experience.”
CREATE-X Winner:
The finale wrapped up with Uzun winning the People’s Choice Award and the CREATE-X launch award. Erkam’s research Privacy-Preserving Surveillance, is based on diver applications of facial recognition. “Winning the CREATE-X award will give us the opportunity to reach out to more people, and eventually a large marketspace,” said Uzun.
CREATE-X Launch program seat worth $4,000 in grant funding and additional value in services including legal services, mentorship, IP protection, and visibility.
People’s Choice Winner:
Uzun won the CREATE-X award along with the People’s Choice Award, where Demo Day attendees cast their vote. “Being awarded the People’s Choice Award reinforced the confidence that people need our research.”
- $1,000 prize for People's Choice Award, courtesy of the Institute for Information Security and Privacy.
The Cybersecurity Demo Day Finale at Georgia Tech culminates a program that introduces Ph.D.and Masters Students to new methodologies that help them discover the market impact of their research ideas. They are exposed to mentors and thought leaders in cybersecurity. Attendees have the opportunity to engage with these students and Georgia Tech's robust entrepreneurial ecosystem, including VentureLab, ATDC, and CREATE-X.
► For Georgia Tech students who want to learn more about Demo Day 2021 and entrepreneurial opportunities at Georgia Tech, sign up here.
Demo Day Finale:
Wenke Lee, Ph.D., Georgia Tech
- Executive Director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP)
- Professor and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair in the School of Computer Science
Raheem Beyah, Ph.D., Georgia Tech
- Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research
- Executive Director of the Online Masters of Cybersecurity program (OMS Cybersecurity)
- Motorola Foundation Professor in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Our Judges
The Students Participating This Year
COMMERCIALIZATION TRACK
RESEARCH TRACK
Our Partners
Georgia Tech's Entrepreneurial Eco-System
This year's prize pool support comes from the Institute for Information Security & Privacy, the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, and Create-X Startup LAUNCH.
Here is a Recap of The 2019 Demo Day Finale
About the Judges
- Blake Patton, Tech Square Ventures
Blake Patton is the founder and managing partner of Tech Square Ventures, a seed- and early-stage venture fund in Atlanta that invests in innovative startups with potential to transform their markets. Patton represents Tech Square Ventures on the boards of Cypress.io, Pointivo, PreTel Health, Sequr, and UserIQ, and is a board observer of Haste and Salesfusion. He also serves as Tech Square Venture’s fund manager for Engage, an innovative accelerator and venture fund in partnership with 10 leading corporations and Georgia Tech.
- Richard Telljohann, IBM Security
Rich Telljohann is Director for Business and Corporate Development for IBM Security. In this role, he leads the Technology Alliances and Ecosystem strategy and organization, and is also a core member of the M&A team.
- John Schanz, TDF Ventures
John Schanz has built high-performance teams that have navigated the industry through profound change. He has been recognized as a key contributor to the massive scaling and advancement of Internet infrastructure. John helped scale the global Internet core at Sprint, and his team enabled Aol to grow into the predominant Internet Service Provider of its era.Currently, John is a Senior Advisor at BBH Capital Partners, Graham Partners and TDF Ventures. John is on the Board of Congruex LiquidSky. He has held senior leadership positions at Comcast, Aol, Transaction Network Services, MediaCenters, Sprint and GE. He serves as chairman of the Board of Cabrini University.
About the Winners
Student Competition Prizes
Finalists will compete for over $100,000 in funding and prizes, as they move research from the lab to the marketplace. The National Science Foundation I-Corps Grants are available to the participating students.
The following Demo Day Finale prizes were awarded.
The following Demo Day Finale prizes were awarded
- $7,000 cash prize for Commercialization Track, courtesy of the Institute for Information Security and Privacy
Commercialization Track Winner: MLsploit
- $4,000 cash prize for Research Track, courtesy of the Institute for Information Security and Privacy.
Tie between Needlestack – Elizabeth Krizay & Home IoT – Omar Alrawi
($4,000 – split between 2,000/ $2 ,000)
Research Track Winner: Home-based IoT Security Evaluations
Home-based Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices are often released with cyber vulnerabilities due to pressures related to time-to-market and production costs which may take priority over prudent security practices.
The team presents an objective approach to evaluating a home-based IoT deployment and uncovering latent vulnerabilities across all components. The approach includes:
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Empirically quantifying security metrics for smart-home devices
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Comprehensively covering all aspects of smart home deployment (device, mobile application, cloud, and communication)
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Temporally measuring the security posture of home-based IoT devices and tracking their improvement through historical data
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Providing an open and transparent approach
Research Track Winner: Needlestack: An Obfuscation Framework for Protecting Browsing Privacy
In response to a March 28, 2017, congressional resolution to repeal an earlier regulation, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are allowed to collect and store private information such as every search, website visited, article read, and location of their subscribers.
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$2,000 cash prize for People's Choice Award, courtesy of the Institute for Information Security and Privacy.
CREATE-X Winner: RFDIDS – Tohid Shekari
Recent events affecting power grids (such as the Ukrainian blackout in 2015) have highlighted the vulnerabilities in modern power systems, especially power substations which form the backbone of electricity networks. There have been significant efforts among researchers to develop effective intrusion detection systems (IDS) in order to prevent such attacks or reduce their damaging consequences. However, all of the existing techniques require some level of trust from components on the SCADA network; hence, they are still vulnerable to sophisticated attacks that would compromise the SCADA system completely. This research presents a radio frequency-based distributed IDS which remains reliable even when the entire SCADA system is considered untrusted. The developed air-gapped sensor is also robust against replay/ spoofing attacks, meaning that the attacker is not able to feed it fake data.
Presenter: Tohid Shekari is currently a double major student (PhD in ECE and MSc in Cybersecurity) with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is doing research on the security of power grids under the supervision of Dr. Raheem Beyah. Specifically, his current research interests include cybersecurity in power systems, power system resilience, and application of optimization methods in power system operation. Mr. Shekari has won several research awards including the Best Paper Award in the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2018.
- CREATE-X Launch program seat worth $4,000 in grant funding and $30,000 of value in services including legal services, space, mentorship, IP protection, and visibility)
The Cybersecurity Demo Day Finale at Georgia Tech brings together graduate students, faculty and industry thought leaders to explore emerging cybersecurity research. Attendees have the opportunity to engage with Georgia Tech's robust entrepreneurial ecosystem, including VentureLab, ATDC, and CREATE-X.
