Ryley McGinnis

Senior sees public speaking as a key to success in engineering

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 15:29:59 +0000

Senior sees public speaking as a key to success in engineering Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/11/2021 - 10:29

Electrical engineering student Jazzmin Robinson knows the value public speaking skills hold for a career in engineering.

Jazzmin Robinson credits her industry and student organization experience for pushing her out of her comfort zone. Photo Provided.

A senior, Robinson’s wake-up call with stage fright was during a presentation at her first big internship with the Department of Defense. “I never knew this about myself, and my friends and supervisors were shocked that I was so terrified,” she says.

This moment was a turning point for Robinson. She knew then that to become a successful engineer she needed to find ways to utilize the many organizations across the Mason community to become a leader on George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus.

“I always enjoyed being involved, but the day that I realized my fear of public speaking was pretty crippling, that added to my motivation,” says Robinson.

A Richmond, Virginia native, Robinson has now held six leadership positions at Mason. Currently, she is the public relations chair for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) region two executive board and the vice president for NSBE’s collegiate chapter. She is also secretary for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.

“The organizations I’ve been a part of have given me so much exposure and leadership experience, and it has given me much more confidence in presenting and public speaking,” she says.

Robinson sees the skill as crucial to a successful engineering career because of the collaborative nature of the field. “In NSBE, IEEE, and others, we have to work together to reach specific outcomes. But at the end of the day, we need to be able to mentor others and tell outsiders all that we’ve done,” she says. “In engineering, you need to similarly communicate with other stakeholders on projects you are working on.”

In other internships and even her senior design project, the importance of leadership and speaking skills held constant. Sometimes in our engineering education, we are so busy learning theories or principles, that the communication skills fall behind, says Robinson. But she thinks that all students should find a way to build a communications and leadership toolkit.

As a student leader, she has made it a mission to help other students develop these skills. As NSBE’s regional public relations chair, she started a new initiative to try and expose collegiate NSBE leaders to how the regional team operates. “NSBE at the collegiate level has a pretty big structure, with more than 500 chapters, there are regional teams that oversee collegiate chapters, and I felt it could be beneficial for collegiate members to see how the regional team runs,” she says. “Past leaders in the student organizations I’ve been in have really inspired me to be a better leader.”

After her graduation in May, Robinson plans to take these skills into whatever career she chooses, but she admits she will miss the collaborative nature at Mason. “I love it at Mason, and I’ve been able to learn so much. While I am excited to get my career started, I will miss Mason for sure.”

Topics

Electrical Engineering

Volgenau School of Engineering

National Society of Black Engineers

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Students

Researchers receive over $1.5 million from DARPA to optimize security and energy tradeoff

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 17:47:20 +0000

Researchers receive over $1.5 million from DARPA to optimize security and energy tradeoff Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/02/2021 - 12:47

Topics

Cyber Security Research

Cybersecurity

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In This Story

Brian Mark

Khaled Khasawneh

Kai Zeng

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao, Kai Zeng, Khaled Khasawneh, and Brian Mark are collaborating with researchers at Virginia Tech to optimize the safety and energy-efficient tradeoff.

The capabilities and reach of 5G are expanding, but with new capabilities come new security challenges. Four Mason Engineering researchers received a $1.6 million grant from DARPA to tackle one of the many security issues that 5G poses as part of a larger DARPA initiative called Open, Programmable, Secure 5G (OPS-5G).

The grant, entitled EPIC SWaPD: Energy Preserving Internet of Things (IoT) Cryptography for Small Weight and Power Devices, aims to optimize the security and energy efficiency tradeoff by creating a low-energy security architecture for various types of IoT devices.

“In a network, there are many different devices of different sizes and capabilities. Many of these devices don’t have much computing power or battery life, and a common cybersecurity attack on these devices is to drain their battery life,” says Brian Mark, co-principal investigator on the grant.

Mark, Khaled Khasawneh, Kai Zeng, and Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are collaborating with the company Kryptowire and Assistant Professor Matthew Hicks from Virginia Tech for the project.

These small IoT devices could be as simple as a thermometer or humidity sensor that is part of a larger smart home system. “These sensors can be very tiny, and they have limited computation and communication capabilities. The first step for each of these types of sensors would be to bootstrap, or link, a secure connection to the network, which requires authentication without pre-shared secrets. This is where the vulnerabilities lie,” says Kai Zeng.

When sensors or other types of small IoT devices must automatically authenticate themselves, attackers have many paths of attack. They can drain the device's battery, rendering it useless, or steal sensitive information or data from the device. Because of the many pathways that attackers could use to harm these devices, the team is combining cryptography, network protocol design, and machine learning to assure the success and scalability of their efforts.

“Something really important for this effort is that the security architecture operates on the principles of zero trust and least privilege,” says Mark. “Zero trust means that when a device comes in and wants to join the network, the assumption is that there is no prior trust or information shared between the devices, while least privilege implies the minimum permissions are granted to the entity to perform its task. So, we needed to bootstrap the security association and grant an entity just enough authority to access the devices or data that it needs but no more than that.”

One way they are looking at securing the connection is through gait-inspired authentication, which leverages the kinetic energy generated by a human user. “Every device harvests energy in a different way, and we use the harvesting pattern for authentication of the device, which preserves energy and accomplishes a security task at the same time,” says Dinakarrao.

Another approach is to exploit the “always-on” sensors in some devices like smartphones. “We plan to employ always-on sensing to perform the exchange of device identification and cryptographic material,” says Khasawneh.

They are also using machine learning to ensure both authentication and authorization of different devices. “We not only have to authenticate the devices and entities that are allowed on a network, but we have to verify their different roles and privileges. I might be granted access to the information that tells me the temperature of a room, but perhaps I might not have the authorization to change the thermostat setting,” says Mark. “Using graph-based models, we can verify the trust relationships of different devices or entities and this process can be accelerated using machine learning techniques,” adds Dinakarrao.

Long-term, the team aspires for their security architecture to easily be applied to other devices. “When we talk about the energy and security tradeoff, we have to think about how we can do things in a smart way to conserve energy while enhancing security. But we also need to think about how to make our architecture scalable to larger, more geographically distributed networks. Right now, this work is with smaller devices, but the hope is that our overall security architecture can apply to a variety of devices with different capabilities,” says Mark.

Mason Engineering students and faculty compete at 99 Luftballoons competition

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 17:02:30 +0000

Mason Engineering students and faculty compete at 99 Luftballoons competition Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/08/2021 - 12:02

Left to right: Dinesh Karri, Robert Hooks, and Joseph Matthew Prince getting ready to compete at the Luftballoons competition at Indiana University.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) robotic shark blimp, which is what a team of George Mason University students and faculty used to participate in the 99++ Luftballoons Competition at Indiana University on November 9 through 13.

The competition took place at the Indiana University Bloomington campus where people from Mason, the University of California Los Angeles, Indiana University at Bloomington, Pennsylvania State University, the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Surface Warfare Center – Crane Division, and the Army Research Laboratory competed in an aerial soccer match using remote-controlled LTA robots.

“LTA robots don’t need any support to hold them in the air. Helicopters need propellers, but all LTA robots can stay in the air on their own. Instead, they need controls to move them about in the air,” says Mason graduate student and competition teammate Joseph Prince Mathew.

Each team had defenders and seekers to protect their goal and score points against the other team. “It got pretty competitive,” says Dinesh Karri, another team member. “But it was so much fun.”

Every team played each other, and the teams with the most points faced off at the end of the five-day event. “Unfortunately, we lost, but we had the most points overall throughout the week,” says Mathew.

Mathew and Karri were working with Assistant Professor Feitian Zhang to develop an underwater glider as part of their PhD studies when they found out about the opportunity to bring their skills to the air. “It was a change of medium, from underwater to air. The dynamics are pretty similar,” says Mathew.

Robert Hooks, a junior undergraduate electrical engineering major, jumped on the project because of his interest in robotics and autonomous systems. “When I heard about it from one of my professors, I was very intrigued. It was a valuable and fun experience to learn hands-on,” says Hooks.

Topics

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

swarm robotics

Robots

aeronautics

In This Story

Cameron Nowzari

STEM summer camps spark student collaboration

4429684e-ae8d-405e-870a-3b7aefe68162 (Martha Bushong) — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 16:22:09 +0000

STEM summer camps spark student collaboration 4429684e-ae8d-… Fri, 07/12/2019 - 12:22

Students (from front left to front right) Veronika Shcherbynina, Riley Blackburn, Nathan Madden, Caleb Faulkerson, and Elyssia Brown use common household items like cardboard, hot glue, and tape to test their water-proofing skills and learn about civil engineering concepts. Photo by Ryley McGinnis.

Tinfoil and hot glue aren’t what most people would use to waterproof their houses, but for the middle school to high school-aged campers participating in the Volgenau School of Engineering’s STEM Summer Camps, these are some of the tools they used to learn the basics of civil engineering.

The camps started July 8 and continue through August 9. Each week focuses on different areas in engineering, computer science, big data, and more. Mason Engineering students are on hand to lend a hand and help the campers with their projects.

“We have 120 students enrolled in our STEM summer camps this year,” says Kammy Sanghera, STEM outreach director for Mason Engineering. “The students enjoy hands-on activities and being at our state-of-the-art facility. They are eager to learn what they could do with the concepts and tools they learn from us.”

“A lot of young kids don’t want anything to do with science or math, but this shows them that civil engineering is more than crunching numbers, that bioengineering can save lives, that with computer engineering you can build computers, and so much more,” Ayeni says. “That knowledge has value.”

Ephraim Ayeni, electrical engineering student

In the first week of the camps, the campers learned fundamentals of four areas of engineering from Mason Engineering students in their respective majors: electrical, civil, mechanical, and bioengineering.

After that first week, campers can expand their knowledge of specific topics, such as networking, cybersecurity, big data, with different camps through the remainder of the summer.

“Students are coming here as part of their decision-making process, so we make the camps hands-on to give them a brief overview of what engineering does to help them figure out what interests them,” says Bhargavi Mavintop, a computer science graduate teaching assistant and a camp coordinator.

Mason Engineering students start by teaching the participants the basics of each field and expanding to more difficult topics, which allows the campers to be very specialized.

“I do appreciate that Mason is making this available and making it specific so that they get full exposure to the different areas of engineering,” says Mason junior Ephraim Ayeni, one of the instructors for the electrical engineering section of the camps.

Ayeni and his fellow instructor, Aaron Suresh, a junior studying electrical engineering, began their undergraduate careers as computer engineering majors, but both later realized that their perception of computer engineering was much different than reality and that they enjoyed electrical engineering more.

They hope these camps not only expose students to engineering but show them the path they want to take.

“I wish I had this exposure earlier in my life, maybe my experience would’ve been different,” says Ayeni. “Exposing them to different types of fields shows them the type of engineering that is meant for them.”

While these campers are learning new technical skills, both Ayeni and Suresh emphasized that they are trying to also teach them problem-solving strategies, and how to work with other people.

“My least favorite part is watching kids get frustrated and quit,” Suresh says. “It’s okay if it’s hard, but when you just sit there and let your partner do everything you won’t learn anything.”

Ayeni and Suresh tried to promote teamwork by actively encouraging participants to talk to one another, which they hoped would lead to more perseverance in understanding the skills themselves if they had a partner to help them.

“These kids are so lucky, they are growing up in an age where technology is so convenient and they shouldn’t take it for granted,” Ayeni says.

Ayeni and Suresh, along with the other instructors for these camps, hope that teaching the campers about their fields will show them what engineering has to offer and hopefully will draw more young minds into the ever-growing field.

“A lot of young kids don’t want anything to do with science or math, but this shows them that civil engineering is more than crunching numbers, that bioengineering can save lives, that with computer engineering you can build computers, and so much more,” Ayeni says. “That knowledge has value.”