Three faculty researchers in North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s College of Engineering were awarded a two-year, $493,957 grant to research how to modernize artificial intelligence systems that are vulnerable to unexpected behaviors and attacks in order to protect data.
Awarded in August 2021, the grant was given by the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (NCAE-C) and sponsored by the Department of Defense’s National Security Agency (NSA). The grant also has the potential to be extended for a third year.
The researchers aim to address issues of national security that involve the integration of AI solutions, including autonomous vehicles, robots, defense systems, battlefield infrastructure and traffic flow management. The research addresses the risk of adversarial attacks in data networks as society continually increases its use of smart devices and AI.
The grant comes ahead of the opening of the Harold L. Martin Sr. Engineering Research and Innovation Complex (ERIC), which is set to open next spring. The TBJ previously reported that the $90-million center is designed to enhance the research capabilities and to foster engineering and computer science collaborations at the nation's leading university for Black engineers.
The three NC A&T faculty researchers are: Kaushik Roy, an associate professor in computer science; Balakrishna Gokaraju, an associate professor in computational data science and engineering; and Albert Esterline, an associate professor in computer science. Roy will serve as the principal investigator on the project.
“To address these critical challenges, we are building secure and trustworthy AI for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) for the NSA,” Roy said. “Our multidisciplinary team of faculty and students from A&T and Florida A&M University will develop and enhance cybersecurity as well as AI and machine learning techniques for CPS in ways that are relevant to the nation’s defense.”
Cyber physical systems combine the sensing, computation, networking and physical processing that is controlled by algorithms. AI systems require the high level of protection that can be provided through cybersecurity innovations due to the amount of data that they can store.
“With this research, we will strength the operations of highly automated AI systems to withstand the vulnerability for unexpected or adversarial behaviors. This work will enable cybersecurity for national media, political campaigns, newspapers and social media content,” Gokaraju said.
For his part of the project, Esterline will lead the research in the “trustworthiness” between AI systems by utilizing a “handshake” approach so that the two systems can verify each other’s security and work together. This is critical for systems to be able to recognize data breaches quickly and safely.
Roy said that they will apply adversarial machine learning and use statistical learning models to predict malicious attacks and make the systems more resilient through explainable AI.
The grant will also be used to a support a student researcher. The student will take a headshot photo of one person and create 1,000 fake versions of the image to train the AI to decipher the authentic photo and recognize imposter data.
NC A&T holds a NSA designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity for research and education, which are two of the three possible designations (cyber options being third). NC A&T is the first historically Black college or university (HBCU) to hold two of NSA’s designations.
The announcement of this grant supported by the NSA comes a day after the announcement that NC A&T also received a three-year, $320,565 grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Build and Broaden Program for research on speech science to help improve automatic speech recognition systems.
