Two NSF Awards for ECE Alum Michael Zuzak (Ph.D. ’22)

ECE Alum Michael Zuzak (Ph.D. ’22) has been awarded two prestigious NSF awards: the NSF EArly-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) and NSF Computer and Information and Science Engineering Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award.

Zuzak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a digital designer at the US Naval Research Laboratory, where he researched high-frequency, wide-band digital signal processing system architecture.

His NSF EAGER Award, titled “Towards Crowd-Sourced Artifact Curation for Cyberattacks through a Learner-Centered AI Co-Pilot”, is 2 year $300,000 grant. Using cross-disciplinary approaches to cybersecurity, his research will be beneficial by creating less costly and more efficient solutions to identify weaknesses in cyber systems arising from the constantly increasing list of new vulnerabilities. Artificial intelligence tools will be developed to model the behavior of cyberattackers in order to reproduce attacks in a controlled setting, identify mitigation strategies, and help train the next generation of cybersecurity experts.

“SaTC: Deign Space Modeling for Logic Obfuscation to Enable System-Wide Security during IC Manufacture and Test” is the title of Zuzak’s NSF CRII Award. The rising costs of semiconductor manufacturing has forced many computer chip designers to rely on offshore manufacturing. Unfortunately, this often results in the lack of secure intellectual property, piracy and theft. In order to prevent these challenges, logic obfuscation, or logic locking, was developed, but its effectiveness can vary depending on the obfuscation resources with a system.

His project for the CRII Award will focus on developing a consistent method for modeling, automating and evaluating the high-level configuration of logic obfuscation in a system in order to maximize security with minimal design overhead. This additional level of security in computer chips is essential for high-trust applications, such as those in healthcare, defense, finance and automotive industries.

While at UMD, Zuzak was honored with a Clark School of Engineering Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award. He was named a Future Faculty Fellow for the Clark School of Engineering. He was advised by Professor Ankur Srivastava.

Published August 9, 2024