UGA's Perdisci receives Amazon Research Award

graphic illustrations with figure, computer, shapes and colorful designs
By:
Alan Flurry
Roberto Perdisci, Patty and D.R. Grimes Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Director of the UGA Institute of Cybersecurity and Privacy, was selected as a recipient of an Amazon Research Award.
 
Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provide unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. This cycle, ARA announced 73 award recipients who represent 46 universities in 10 countries.
 
The awards were funded for five categories during the fall 2024 cycle: AI for Information Security, Automated Reasoning, AWS AI, AWS Cryptography, and Sustainability. Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact both the research community and society. 
 
Perdisci, an expert in computer and network security, malware detection, pattern recognition, data mining in the School of Computing, is one of four awardees in the AI for Information Security category. The award will support his project, ContextADBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Contextual Anomaly Detection. He credits the great work of PhD student Spencer King for making the award possible.
 
"I was originally introduced to this work while interning at Amazon Web Services during summer 2024," King said. "It is an exciting research direction that has the ability change the way that we thinking about anomaly detection particular for large scale industry level datasets. 
 
The project will be a follow up work to the main project King was working on at Amazon that aimed at showcasing the effectiveness of “Contextual Learning,” or allowing models to take into account context when making decisions about anomalies. King will be the lead researcher on this project, which should take about a year to complete. 
 
"Contextual learning enables a single model to adapt intelligently across contextual environments without needing separate models for each scenario, a major breakthrough for scalability in AD systems," King said. "It has been a pleasure to work in the NIS Lab (Network Intelligence and Security) thus far. The team around me is excellent and under Dr. Perdisci’s mentorship we have been able to work on several very interesting problem. Very thankful for the opportunity to be a part of his team, and to tackle tough problems together. "
 
All awardees will have access to Amazon public datasets, along with AWS AI/ML services and tools. https://amzn.to/3FHbGWj 
 
Image via creative commons license.
Chronicles Tagging:
computing
information
AI
Amazon
faculty
graduate students
award
research
project
learning
models
datasets

Support Franklin College

We appreciate your financial support. Your gift is important to us and helps support critical opportunities for students and faculty alike, including lectures, travel support, and any number of educational events that augment the classroom experience.

 Click here to learn more about giving

Every dollar given has a direct impact upon our students and faculty.