How can a self-driving car learn to avoid mistakes? How can researchers spot errors in a malware detection system before they cause problems? These are some of the questions new assistant professor Yinzhi Cao explores in his research. Cao comes to Johns Hopkins from Lehigh University, where he served as an assistant professor for the past three years. He earned his doctorate from Northwestern University and completed his postdoctoral work at Columbia University. He has a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Cao’s research interests include web security, network security and mobile security. He examines these problems from multiple perspectives. For example, he has both worked to improve technology to track users across browsers while also developing a browser that allows for greater anonymity. He will be teaching web security in the fall semester.
Just as a city relies on infrastructure keep things moving smoothly, an app needs data infrastructure to run efficiently and securely. New assistant professor Soudeh Ghorbani designs foundational network systems to make this infrastructure both faster and more reliable. She creates low-latency, provably-stable datacenters and cloud computing facilities. She also designs verification algorithms that enable network operators to ensure the safety and reliability of key infrastructure, such as systems that detect intrusions and block malicious traffic. Ghorbani received her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin. She holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Toronto and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in Iran. She will be teaching advanced networking in the fall.