Matthew McDowell, Associate Professor, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Strategic Energy Institute Initiative Lead for Energy Storage
Associate Professor Matthew McDowell has been selected as the next Associate Chair for Research in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He will step into the role on January 1, 2025.
The Associate Chair for Research is responsible for working with the Woodruff School’s faculty to develop a strategic research plan for future growth and investments in the School, as well as identifying new research opportunities, helping to foster strategic relationships with government, industry, and foundations, and synergizing research efforts with other units in the College of Engineering and across the Institute.
“I am thrilled to be chosen for this role, and I look forward to working with the faculty, students, researchers, and staff of the Woodruff School to enhance and support our world-class research program,” said McDowell.
McDowell joined Georgia Tech in the fall of 2015 as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Woodruff School and the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). He was named Carter N. Paden, Jr. Distinguished Chair earlier this year and serves as co-director of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center (GTABC). Through this center, McDowell and Professor Gleb Yushin (MSE) are building community at the Institute, enhancing research and educational relationships with industry partners, and creating a new battery manufacturing facility on Georgia Tech’s campus.
“I am excited to work with Matt in advancing the research priorities and goals of the Woodruff School,” said Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair and professor. “Through his exceptional leadership of the Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center, Matt has demonstrated a deep commitment to excellence in scholarship and to fostering partnerships that drive innovative, collaborative research across the Institute. I am confident in the positive transformation he will bring to our program in this new role.”
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Johney Green
Johney Green Jr., M.S. ME 1993, Ph.D. ME 2000, has been chosen to serve as the new laboratory director for Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL). A proud Yellow Jacket, Green received both his master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech and currently serves on the Strategic Energy Institute’s (SEI) External Advisory Board. He also served on the board of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering from 2017 to 2022.
“SRNL has truly found an exceptional leader in Johney. His vision and dedication are inspiring, and I am genuinely excited to see the remarkable contributions he will make in advancing SRNL,” said Christine Conwell, SEI interim executive director. “We look forward to his continued partnership with SEI and the positive impact he will bring to the energy community in 2025 and beyond.”
The Battelle Savannah River Alliance (SRNL’s parent organization) selected Green for this role, describing him as “a dynamic leader who brings deep, wide-ranging scientific expertise to this new position.”
With an annual operating budget of about $400 million, SRNL is a multiprogram national lab leading research and development for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Offices of Environmental Management and Legacy Management and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons and nonproliferation programs.
Green currently serves as associate laboratory director for mechanical and thermal engineering sciences at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In this position, he oversees a diverse portfolio of research programs including transportation, buildings, wind, water, geothermal, advanced manufacturing, concentrating solar power, and Arctic research. His leadership impacts a workforce of about 750 and involves managing a budget of more than $300 million.
At NREL, Green transformed the lab’s wind site into the innovative Flatirons Campus and transitioned the campus from a single-program wind research site to a multiprogram research campus that serves as the foundational experimental platform for the DOE’s Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) initiative.
"We are immensely proud to call Johney a Woodruff School alumnus. His achievements and service to Tech through advisory board engagement inspires us, and we are excited to see him step into this prestigious role at SRNL. We look forward to deepening our collaboration with him as he continues to make a powerful impact,” said Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and professor in the Woodruff School.
Prior to his role at NREL, Green held several key leadership roles at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). As director of the Energy and Transportation Science Division and group leader for fuels, engines, and emissions research, he managed a broad science and technology portfolio and user facilities that made significant science and engineering advances in building technologies; sustainable industrial and manufacturing processes; fuels, engines, emissions, and transportation analysis; and vehicle systems integration. While Green was the division director, ORNL developed the Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy (AMIE) demonstration project, a model of innovative vehicle-to-grid integration technologies and next-generation manufacturing processes.
Early in his career, Green conducted combustion research to stabilize gasoline engine operation under extreme conditions. During the course of that research, he joined a team working with Ford Motor Co., seeking ways to simultaneously extend exhaust gas recirculation limits in diesel engines and reduce nitrogen oxide and particulate matter emissions. He continued this collaboration as a visiting scientist at Ford's Scientific Research Laboratory, conducting modeling and experimental research for advanced diesel engines designed for light-duty vehicles. On assignment to the DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office, Green also served as technical coordinator for the 21st Century Truck Partnership. He also contributed to a dozen of ORNL's 150-plus top scientific discoveries.
Green was the recipient of a National GEM Consortium Master’s Fellowhip sponsored by Georgia Tech and ORNL, and he served as the National GEM Consortium chairperson from 2022-2024. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an SAE International Fellow. He has received several awards during his career and holds two U.S. patents in combustion science.
Priya Devarajan || SEI Communications Program Manager
Assistant Professor Anthony Harding
When it comes to finding solutions to climate change, there’s no shortage of technologies vying for attention, from renewable energy to electric vehicles to nuclear energy. One such contender, solar geoengineering, is favored by proponents who say it could quickly cool the planet and give the world time to fully implement efforts to limit emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere.
But that promise comes with risks, which include potentially poorer air quality or depleted atmospheric ozone – both of which can cause serious health issues of their own.
A new Georgia Tech School of Public Policy-led study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that while those risks deserve further consideration, solar geoengineering could save as many as 400,000 lives a year through a reduction in temperature-related deaths attributable to climate change.
“An important question is how the reduction in climate risks from solar geoengineering compares to the additional risks its use entails,” said lead author Anthony Harding of the School of Public Policy. “This study offers a first step in quantifying the risks and benefits of solar geoengineering and shows that, for the risks we considered, the potential to save lives outweighs the direct risks,"
Harding co-authored the PNAS article with Gabriel Vecchi and Wenchang Yang of Princeton University and David Keith from the University of Chicago.
The researchers studied a climate change mitigation strategy called stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a type of solar geoengineering that involves spraying tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere. Those particles would then redirect some sunlight back to space and help cool Earth.
The authors used computer models and historical data on how temperature affects death rates to see how much solar geoengineering might affect death rates, assuming a 2.5-degree Celsius increase in average temperature from pre-industrial levels and similar approaches to climate change as seen in the world currently.
They found that cooling global temperatures by 1 degree Celsius with solar geoengineering would save 400,000 lives each year, outweighing deaths caused by solar geoengineering’s direct health risks from air pollution and ozone depletion by a factor of 13. This means that the number of lives saved due to solar geoengineering-caused cooling would be 13 times the number of lives potentially lost from solar geoengineering’s known risks.
Many of those deaths would be avoided in hotter, poorer regions, the study notes. Cooler, wealthier regions could actually face increased cold-related deaths.
Solar geoengineering has generated millions of dollars in funding and a recommendation by the National Academies of Science that the federal government should provide millions more toward research and the development of a risk-risk analysis similar to what Harding’s team produced. But the tech has also drawn concern, including from the Union of Concerned Scientists. That group says there’s too much environmental, ethical, and geopolitical risk to proceed without much more research.
The authors caution that their study is an important starting point in better understanding solar geoengineering's promise and peril but is far from a comprehensive evaluation of the technology’s risks and benefits.
They say their models are based on idealized assumptions about aerosol distribution, population and income growth, and other factors. They also can’t capture all of the real-world complexities that solar geoengineering would entail. They note their study also does not address all of the potential risks of solar geoengineering, such as possible impacts on ecosystems, global politics, or the possibility governments will rely on the technology to delay politically difficult emissions cuts.
Still, the researchers say, the study suggests that for many regions, solar geoengineering could well be more effective at saving lives than emissions reductions alone and is worth keeping in the mix as the world searches for the optimal ways to cool our warming planet.
“There’s no perfect resolution to the climate crisis,” said Harding. “Solar geoengineering entails risks, but it could also alleviate real suffering, so we need to better understand how the risks compare to the benefits to inform any potential future decisions around the technology.”
The paper, “Impact of Solar Geoengineering on Temperature-Attributable Mortality,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Dec. 17. It is available at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401801121.
Michael Pearson
Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Created in partnership with the new Science for Georgia’s Tomorrow initiative, the College of Sciences has launched the Rising Tide Program, which will equip early career scientists with two-year fellowships that are focused on faculty mentoring and skills development to apply for competitive faculty positions.
The inaugural Rising Tide cohort is set to include seven fellows from several institutions — with research interests across nuclear physics, urban climate, resource recovery, machine learning, bioinformatics, and ecology.
Rising Tide is spearheaded by Alex Robel, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who serves as the Program’s inaugural director.
The Program has three primary goals. “We aim to improve our ability to recruit the most promising young scientists and mathematicians to careers at Georgia Tech, to raise the profile of Tech as an institution that develops academic careers in the sciences, and to better align the range of perspectives and lived experiences of faculty with Georgia Tech students,” Robel shares.
Robel adds that the program leverages the strong culture of mentorship in the College.
“Since I have been at Georgia Tech, I have been inspired by the many individual faculty in the College of Sciences who have achieved consistent success in mentoring students and postdocs to gratifying academic careers,” he says. “In designing the Rising Tide Program, my aim was to organize these successful faculty within a program that supports their existing efforts and complements those efforts with professional career development activities.”
The Rising Tide Program is supported by a generous gift from Nathan Meehan (PHYS 1975) and matching funds from the Office of the Provost.
Rising Tide is part of the just-launched Science for Georgia’s Tomorrow Center, which prioritizes research and teaching aligned with Georgia-specific issues — while connecting Georgia communities with that research and teaching. Robel hopes the Program will help provide a pathway to foster this type of local research at the Institute.
“Part of Rising Tide is to bring more faculty to the Institute who can contribute to research and teaching particularly relevant to communities in Georgia,” Robel explains. “We aim to improve the ability of the College to recruit scientists with professional or lived experience in the Southeast — or focused on research with particular relevance to the Southeast.”
Early career scientists at any institution can be nominated by College of Sciences faculty to participate in Rising Tide. Selected Fellows take part in the two-year program, where they are welcomed into the Georgia Tech community — then mentored virtually by College faculty and supported with ongoing opportunities to develop skills for applying to competitive faculty positions.
Robel emphasizes that, for the College and new Rising Tide Fellows, it’s a win-win.
“I am most excited to see how this first cohort of fellows interact and learn from each other,” Robel says. “I am also looking forward to seeing what new and exciting ideas and perspectives they can bring to the research and teaching mission of the College of Sciences.”
Written by Selena Langner
Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
The Georgia Tech EcoCommons (Photo by Nick Hubbard)
The College of Sciences at Georgia Tech is proud to launch Science for Georgia’s Tomorrow, a new center focused on research that aims to improve life across the state of Georgia.
“From resilient communities and agriculture, to health and sustainable energy resources, Science for Georgia's Tomorrow will focus on improving the lives of Georgians and their communities,” Dean Susan Lozier says.
An expansion of the College’s strategic plan, Science for Georgia's Tomorrow — Sci4GT, for short — will serve as a statewide fulcrum, fostering research in direct service to Georgia cities, counties, and communities.
The center specifically addresses critical health and climate challenges throughout Georgia, and aims to pave the way for increased public-private partnerships. The initiative will also expand access — broadening participation opportunities for Georgia students and communities to engage with research.
The search for an inaugural faculty director has commenced, and will be followed by a dedicated cluster hire in 2025, funded by the Office of the Provost. Dean Lozier, who also serves as a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has reserved funds from the College of Sciences Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Dean’s Chair to initiate the center.
Selected from a pool of 17 faculty proposals, two dedicated faculty cluster hires will focus on improving the health of Georgians and Georgia’s communities — and the resilience of humans and ecosystems to current and anticipated climate change in the state. Appointments will be sought across the College’s six schools.
“These proposals address themes that are critically important right now for Georgia Tech research growth: sustainability and climate, along with health and well-being,” says Julia Kubanek, Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research at Georgia Tech and a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “This is an opportunity for Georgia to be a model for the nation on how to solve health disparities.”
“These new cluster hires will strengthen the College’s existing research programs,” Lozier adds. “They will also facilitate large collaborations across campus, and educate the next generation of scientists who will tackle these problems in Georgia and beyond.”
An adjacent effort, the new College of Sciences Rising Tide Program, is selecting promising early-career scientists for a two-year virtual mentorship initiative.
The Rising Tide Program will work in tandem with the Sci4GT cluster hire, complementing the strong culture of mentorship in the College, while providing a pathway to support local research at the Institute.
“Rising Tide aims to help the College recruit scientists with professional or lived experiences in the Southeast — or focused on research with particular relevance to the Southeast,” explains Rising Tide Director Alex Robel, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “One of our key goals is to bring more faculty to Georgia Tech who can contribute to research and teaching that’s particularly relevant to communities in Georgia.”
“The reach of Georgia Tech is global,” Lozier adds. “Our fingerprints are on discoveries and innovations that benefit people and their communities around the world. As researchers at a leading public university in the state of Georgia, we are also cognizant of the responsibility and opportunity to focus our efforts more intently here at home.”
The College has launched an internal leadership search for the Science for Georgia’s Tomorrow center, with an expected appointment to be announced in February 2025. The inaugural director will have the opportunity to shape the direction of this new initiative by:
All faculty who hold a majority appointment within the College of Sciences are eligible and encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply via InfoReady.
Initial support for Sci4GT is generously provided by the College of Sciences Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Dean's Chair fund. Cluster hire funding has been awarded by Provost Steven W. McLaughlin.
Sci4GT will also seek funding from state, national and international organizations, private foundations, and government agencies to expand impact. Philanthropic support will also be sought in the form of professorships, programmatic support for the center, and seed funding.
Written by: Selena Langner
Media contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
A new machine learning (ML) model from Georgia Tech could protect communities from diseases, better manage electricity consumption in cities, and promote business growth, all at the same time.
Researchers from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) created the Large Pre-Trained Time-Series Model (LPTM) framework. LPTM is a single foundational model that completes forecasting tasks across a broad range of domains.
Along with performing as well or better than models purpose-built for their applications, LPTM requires 40% less data and 50% less training time than current baselines. In some cases, LPTM can be deployed without any training data.
The key to LPTM is that it is pre-trained on datasets from different industries like healthcare, transportation, and energy. The Georgia Tech group created an adaptive segmentation module to make effective use of these vastly different datasets.
The Georgia Tech researchers will present LPTM in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). NeurIPS is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences on artificial intelligence (AI) and ML research.
“The foundational model paradigm started with text and image, but people haven’t explored time-series tasks yet because those were considered too diverse across domains,” said B. Aditya Prakash, one of LPTM’s developers.
“Our work is a pioneer in this new area of exploration where only few attempts have been made so far.”
[MICROSITE: Georgia Tech at NeurIPS 2024]
Foundational models are trained with data from different fields, making them powerful tools when assigned tasks. Foundational models drive GPT, DALL-E, and other popular generative AI platforms used today. LPTM is different though because it is geared toward time-series, not text and image generation.
The Georgia Tech researchers trained LPTM on data ranging from epidemics, macroeconomics, power consumption, traffic and transportation, stock markets, and human motion and behavioral datasets.
After training, the group pitted LPTM against 17 other models to make forecasts as close to nine real-case benchmarks. LPTM performed the best on five datasets and placed second on the other four.
The nine benchmarks contained data from real-world collections. These included the spread of influenza in the U.S. and Japan, electricity, traffic, and taxi demand in New York, and financial markets.
The competitor models were purpose-built for their fields. While each model performed well on one or two benchmarks closest to its designed purpose, the models ranked in the middle or bottom on others.
In another experiment, the Georgia Tech group tested LPTM against seven baseline models on the same nine benchmarks in a zero-shot forecasting tasks. Zero-shot means the model is used out of the box and not given any specific guidance during training. LPTM outperformed every model across all benchmarks in this trial.
LPTM performed consistently as a top-runner on all nine benchmarks, demonstrating the model’s potential to achieve superior forecasting results across multiple applications with less and resources.
“Our model also goes beyond forecasting and helps accomplish other tasks,” said Prakash, an associate professor in the School of CSE.
“Classification is a useful time-series task that allows us to understand the nature of the time-series and label whether that time-series is something we understand or is new.”
One reason traditional models are custom-built to their purpose is that fields differ in reporting frequency and trends.
For example, epidemic data is often reported weekly and goes through seasonal peaks with occasional outbreaks. Economic data is captured quarterly and typically remains consistent and monotone over time.
LPTM’s adaptive segmentation module allows it to overcome these timing differences across datasets. When LPTM receives a dataset, the module breaks data into segments of different sizes. Then, it scores all possible ways to segment data and chooses the easiest segment from which to learn useful patterns.
LPTM’s performance, enhanced through the innovation of adaptive segmentation, earned the model acceptance to NeurIPS 2024 for presentation. NeurIPS is one of three primary international conferences on high-impact research in AI and ML. NeurIPS 2024 occurs Dec. 10-15.
Ph.D. student Harshavardhan Kamarthi partnered with Prakash, his advisor, on LPTM. The duo are among the 162 Georgia Tech researchers presenting over 80 papers at the conference.
Prakash is one of 46 Georgia Tech faculty with research accepted at NeurIPS 2024. Nine School of CSE faculty members, nearly one-third of the body, are authors or co-authors of 17 papers accepted at the conference.
Along with sharing their research at NeurIPS 2024, Prakash and Kamarthi released an open-source library of foundational time-series modules that data scientists can use in their applications.
“Given the interest in AI from all walks of life, including business, social, and research and development sectors, a lot of work has been done and thousands of strong papers are submitted to the main AI conferences,” Prakash said.
“Acceptance of our paper speaks to the quality of the work and its potential to advance foundational methodology, and we hope to share that with a larger audience.”
Bryant Wine, Communications Officer
bryant.wine@cc.gatech.edu
Portrait of Tequila Harris
Tequila A.L. Harris, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, leads energy and manufacturing initiatives at the Strategic Energy Institute. Her research explores the connectivity between the functionality of nano- to macro-level films, components, and systems based on their manufacture or design and their life expectancy, elucidating mechanisms by which performance or durability can be predicted. She uses both simulations and experimentation to better understand this connectivity.
By addressing complex, fundamental problems, Harris aims to make an impact on many industries, in particular energy (e.g., polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells), flexible electronics (e.g., organic electronics), and clean energy (e.g., water), among others.
Harris has experience in developing systematic design and manufacturing methodologies for complex systems that directly involve material characterization, tooling design and analysis, computational and analytical modeling, experimentation, and system design and optimization. Currently, her research projects focus on investigating the fundamental science associated with fluid transport, materials processing, and design issues for energy/electronic/environmental systems. Below is a brief Q&A with Harris, where she discusses her research and how it influences the energy and manufacturing initiatives at Georgia Tech.
In graduate school, I aimed to become a roboticist but shifted my focus after realizing I was not passionate about coding. This led me to explore manufacturing, particularly scaled manufacturing processes that transform fluids into thin films for applications in energy systems. Subsequently, my expertise is in coating science and technology and manufacturing system development.
We often ask how we can process materials more cost-effectively and create complex architectures that surpass current capabilities. In energy systems, particularly with fuel cells, reducing the number of manufacturing steps is crucial, as each additional step increases costs and complexity. As researchers, we focus on understanding the implications of minimizing these steps and how they affect the properties and performance of the final devices. My group studies these relationships to find innovative manufacturing solutions. A major challenge in the manufacture of materials lies in scaling efficiently while maintaining performance and keeping costs low enough for commercial adoption. This is a pressing issue, especially for enabling technologies such as batteries, fuel cells, and flexible electronics needed for electric vehicles, where the production volumes are on the order of billions per year.
What interests me most is the inherent possibility of advancing energy technologies holistically, from materials sourcing and materials production to public policy. More specifically, my interests are in understanding how we can scale the manufacture of burgeoning technologies for a variety of areas (energy, food, pharmaceuticals, packaging, and flexible electronics, among others) while reducing cost and increasing production yield. In this regard, we aim to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning in addition to considering limitations surrounding the production lifecycle. The challenges that exist to meet these goals cannot be done in a silo but rather as part of interdisciplinary teams who converge on specific problems. Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to make significant impacts in the energy and manufacturing ecosystem, thanks to our robust infrastructure and expertise. With many manufacturers relocating to Georgia, particularly in the "energy belt" for EVs, batteries, and recycling facilities, Georgia Tech can serve as a crucial partner in advancing these industries and their technologies.
The global impact of advancing manufacturing technologies is significant for processing at relevant economy of scales. To meet such demands, we cannot always rely on existing manufacturing know-how. The Harris group holds the intellectual property on innovative processes that allow for the faster fabrication of individual or multiple materials, and that exhibit higher yields and improved performance than existing methods. Improvements in manufacturing systems often result in reduced waste, which is beneficial to the overall materials development ecosystem. Another global and societal benefit is workforce development. The students on my team are well-trained in the manufacture of materials using tools that are amenable to the most advanced and scalable manufacturing platform, roll-to-roll manufacturing, with integrated coating and printing tools. This unique skill set equips our students to thrive and become leaders in their careers.
By leveraging the new modular pilot-scale roll-to-roll manufacturing facility that integrates slot die coating, gravure/flexography printing, and inkjet printing, I plan to continue reaching out to faculty and industrial partners to find avenues for us to collaborate on a variety of interdisciplinary projects. The goal is to create groups that can help us advance materials development more rapidly by working as a collective from the beginning, versus considering scalable manufacturing pathways as an afterthought. By bringing interdisciplinary groups (chemists, materials scientists, engineers, etc.) together early, we can more efficiently and effectively overcome traditional delays in getting materials to market or, worse, the inability to push materials to market (which is commonly known as the valley of death). This can only be achieved by dismantling barriers that hinder early collaboration. This new facility aims to foster collaborative work among stakeholders, promoting the integrated development and characterization of various materials systems and technologies, and ultimately leading to more efficient manufacturing practices.
I enjoy cooking and exploring my creativity in this space by combining national and international ingredients to make interesting and often delicious fusion cuisines. I also enjoy roller skating, cycling, and watching movies with my family and friends.
From a professional standpoint, my research team influences me the most. After I present them with a problem, they are encouraged and expected to think beyond our initial starting point. This ability to freely think and conceive of novel solutions sparks many new ideas on which to build future ideas. The best cases have kept me up at night, inspiring me to think about how to approach new problems and funding opportunities. I carry their experiences and challenges with me. Their influence on me is profound and is fundamentally why I am a professor.
Priya Devarajan || SEI Communications Program Manager
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new vulnerabilities that could provide criminals with wireless access to the computer systems in automobiles, aircraft, factories, and other cyber-physical systems.
The computers used in vehicles and other cyber-physical systems rely on a specialized internal network to communicate commands between electronics. Because it took place internally, it was traditionally assumed that attackers could only influence this network through physical access.
In collaboration with Hyundai, researchers from Georgia Tech’s Cyber-Physical Systems Security Research Lab (CPSec) observed that threat models used to evaluate the security of these technologies were outdated.
The team, led by Ph.D. student Zhaozhou Tang, found that vehicle technology advancements allowed attackers to launch new attacks, improve existing attacks, and circumvent current defense systems.
For example, Tang’s findings included the possibility for attackers to remotely compromise the computers used in cars and aircraft through Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and other wireless channels.
“Our job was to thoroughly review existing information and find ways to protect against these attacks,” he said. “We found new threats and proposed a defense system that can protect against the new and old attacks.”
In response to their findings, the team developed ERACAN, the first comprehensive defense system against this new generation of attackers. Designed to detect new and old attacks, ERACAN can deploy defenses when necessary.
The system also classifies the attacks it reacts to, providing security experts with the tools for detailed analysis. It has a detection rate of 100% for all attacks launched by conventional methods and detects enhanced threat models 99.7% of the time.
The project received a distinguished paper award at the 2024 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 24) held in Salt Lake City. Tang presented the paper at the October conference.
“This was Zhaozhou’s first paper in his Ph.D. program, and he deserves recognition for his groundbreaking work on automotive cybersecurity,” said Saman Zonouz, associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated the transportation sector as one of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors. Ensuring its security is vital to national security and public safety.
“Modern vehicles, which rely heavily on controller area networks for essential operations, are integral components of this infrastructure,” said Zonouz. “With the increasing sophistication of cyberthreats, safeguarding these systems has become critical to ensuring the resilience and security of transportation networks.”
This paper introduced to the scientific community the first comprehensive defense system to address advanced threats targeting vehicular controller area networks.
The CPSec team is putting the technology it has developed into practice in collaboration with Hyundai America Technical Center, Inc., which sponsors the work. Tang hopes ERACAN’s success will raise awareness of these new threats in the research community and industry.
“It will help them build future defenses,” he said. “We have demonstrated the best practice to defend against these attacks.”
Tang received his bachelor’s degree at Georgia Tech, where he first performed security-related work for the automobile industry. While working with Zonouz on his master’s degree, he decided to change course and pursue research initiatives like vehicle security in a Ph.D. program.
“It is interesting how it came full circle,” he said. “I will continue on this path of automobile security throughout my Ph.D.”
ERACAN: Defending Against an Emerging CAN Threat Model, was written by Zhaozhou Tang, Khaled Serag from the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Saman Zonouz, Berkay Celik and Dongyan Xu from Purdue University, and Raheem Beyah, professor and dean of the College of Engineering. The CPSec Lab is a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
John Popham
Communications Officer II
School of Cybersecurity and Privacy