NYIT Opens New Cyber Lab

Pictured (from left): Acting Associate Dean Huanying Gu, NYIT President Hank Foley, Dean Nada Anid, ESD’s Barry Greenspan, and Intelligent Product Solutions President Mitchell Maiman

On November 15, the grand opening of NYIT’s new cybersecurity lab was also an ideal opportunity to showcase critical research being conducted by faculty and students in NYIT School of Engineering and Computing Sciences.

Nearly 100 guests and members of the NYIT community joined Nada Anid, Ph.D., NYIT President Hank Foley, Ph.D., Empire State Development (ESD) Program Administrator Barry Greenspan, Intelligent Product Solutions President Mitchell Maiman, and Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas in a ceremonial ribbon cutting for the facility, funded by a $400,000 ESD grant. During their remarks, each VIP noted the importance of the facility in educating cybersecurity experts who are much needed locally, nationally, and internationally to safeguard everything from information to infrastructure.

“Empire State Development is proud to support NYIT’s new cybersecurity lab and the advancements in innovation, engineering, and tech that it will catalyze,” said ESD President, CEO, and Commissioner Howard Zemsky. “Long Island is rapidly emerging as a hub for the 21st century economy and 21st century jobs, and New York’s commitment to this project builds on that momentum.”

Designated by the National Security Agency as Long Island’s only National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education, the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences in Long Island is also home to the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center (ETIC), another federal- and state-funded facility and resources for the school’s nearly 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members.

“Since 2011, the amount of engineering graduates on Long Island has doubled and NYIT is a big part of that,” noted ESD’s Greenspan, while Maimen said, “NYIT and this cyber lab address a real need in the world, and this will serve as an important source of talent for Long Island.”

“There are 3,500 small and medium-size factories on Long Island begging for scientists and engineers,” said Foley. “NYIT wants to be their school. Our students are ready to hit the ground running”

After the ribbon was cut, researchers made brief presentations to the audience and then invited them into the new cyber lab to see firsthand progress being made in:

• Continuous Authentication of Smartphone Users (Faculty: Paolo Gasti, Kiran Balagani; students: Savitri Gadagi, Krutik Poojara, Leroy Lomotey
• Evaluating Practical Considerations of Behavioral Biometrics for Mobile Devices (Faculty: Jonathan Voris; student: Sheharyar Naseer)
• Gastric Implant – Wirelessly Powered and Communicated (Faculty: Amir Javan Khoshkholgh, Aydin Farajidavar)
• Identifying Mobile Malware using Text Mining and Analytics (Faculty: Wenjia Li, Houwei Cao; students: Elizabeth Dwulit, Zabbar Alamgir)
• Scalable Name-Lookup Algorithms for Resilient Named Data Networking (NDN) (Student: Maulik Trivedi; faculty: N. Sertac Artan)
• Secure and Energy Efficient Routing for Internet of Things – Based Air Quality Monitoring (Faculty: Anand Santhanakrishnan, Wenjia Li; student: Riddhiben Sudani)
• Using a Virtual Scene to Understand Freezing of Gait of People with Parkinson’s Disease (Faculty: Ziqian “Cecilia” Dong; student: Stephan Brown)
• Motion Planning of Mobile Robot – Q-Bot 2 (Students: Qi Wang, Krivoruk Ian; faculty: Sabiha Wadoo)
• Linear Optimal Control of a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 (Students Ajlan Okman, Sandipan Saha; faculty: Sabiha Wadoo)
• Nanofabricated Electrodes for Disease Diagnostics (Faculty: Azhar Ilyas; students: Kayla Ho, Swapnil Barot
• Secure and Private Sensing for Driver Authentication and Transportation Safety (Faculty: Jonathan Voris, N. Sertac Artan, Wenjia Li)
• Visualization of Sensor Network Data for the Identification of IOT Security Vulnerabilities (Faculty: Michael Nizich)

“This launch exemplifies the spirit of entrepreneurship at NYIT—an institution where you can start with an idea and turn it into reality,” Anid said.