Image: 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. Perdisci, an expert in computer and network security, malware detection, pattern recognition, and data mining in the School of Computing, is one of four awardees in the AI for Information Security area, which was one of the five areas where awards were made. The award will support his project, ContextADBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Contextual Anomaly Detection. All proposals received were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact both the research community and society. The awards were funded for five categories during the Fall 2024 cycle: AI for Information Security, Automated Reasoning, AWS AI, AWS Cryptography, and Sustainability. Dr. Perdisci, an expert in computer and network security, malware detection, pattern recognition, data mining in the School of Computing, is also one of the four awardees in the AI for Information Security category. This award will go on to support his project, ContextADBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Contextual Anomaly Detection. He credits the great work of his PhD student Spencer King for making this award possible for them to receive. This project will build upon King’s previous work at Amazon, where he focused on demonstrating the power of “Contextual Learning," a method that enables models to factor in surrounding context when identifying anomalies. "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." King then continues, "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," He finishes by giving thanks to his lab and Dr. Perdisci, "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. Type of News/Audience: Research Read More: 73 Amazon Research Award recipients announced
