TAMIU Students Participate, Place Third at National Workshop

Undergraduate students at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) and Columbus State University were recently awarded 3rd Place for their poster presentation at the 8th National Workshop for REU Research in Networking and Systems. A total of 24 poster projects from across the nation were presented.

The Workshop was part of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Smart Systems Conference in Denver, CO. 

The poster presentation involved the efforts of Hector Cardenas and Antonio Rosales Viesca from TAMIU and Ryan Zimmerman from Columbus State University. The students relied on the support and guidance of faculty members Dr. Mustafa Al Lail, TAMIU assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Dr. Alfredo Perez, associate professor at Columbus State University. 

Their poster presentation, “Formal UML-based Modeling and Analysis for Securing Location-based IoT Applications,” presented a rigorous mathematical process and a software tool to design and analyze secure Internet of Things (IoT) applications using the Unified Modeling Language.

“The idea that everyday Internet-connected devices such as baby monitors or child toys are secure and cannot be used to spy on their users is naïve and far away from reality. Such devices have many security vulnerabilities, making the security (and privacy) of these systems an essential threat to our modern society,” explained Dr. Al Lail. 

Al Lail notes that their research aims to secure and improve these current security susceptibilities in IoT systems by making improvements through various location-based application models to help detect and fix security issues at the design phase.

The poster presentation of the Workshop is made possible through the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports undergraduate research within the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

The Workshop provides a venue for students to publish their research as part of the REU program and seeks original submissions in research areas funded by the NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. 

Registration for Wintermester and Spring 2023 classes at TAMIU is underway online via UConnect. To learn more about TAMIU’s Registration processes, visit the dedicated Registration Hub at https://go.tamiu.edu/registration. 

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