ISIS - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Senior Research Scientist, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering

Job Titles:

• Senior Research Scientist, Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Computer Engineering

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor
• Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University

Bryan Ward is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining Vanderbilt in Fall 2022, he was a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Secure and Resilient Systems and Technology Group where he worked on research projects on real-time systems and operating-system security for national security especially in the context of embedded systems such as satellites and industrial control systems. He was honored with the 2021 MIT Lincoln Laboratory Outstanding Mentor Award. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016, where he was also a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering and a B.A. in Mathematics at Bucknell University, where he was also the recipient of the 2009 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. He is a senior member of the IEEE. Areas of Expertise Systems security, Operating Systems, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, and Cyber-Physical Systems

Job Titles:

• Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dan Lin joined Computer Science Department at Vanderbilt University as a full professor in Fall 2022. Before that, she was the Robert H. Buescher Faculty Fellow and associate professor with joint appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Management at the University of Missouri and associate chair for Graduate Study and director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the Department of Computer Science at Missouri S&T. She did her postdoc at Purdue University with Professor Elisa Bertino. She also visited Aalborg University (Denmark) and worked with Professor Christian Jensen for three months. Her main research interests cover many areas in the fields of database systems and information security. Her current research includes AI attacks and defense, security and privacy in cloud computing, privacy preservation in social networking, location privacy in mobile applications, routing and security issues in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Her research has been funded by the NSF, NSA and the Department of Energy. She has served as program committee members in many premium conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, ICDCS and SSTD. She is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), and ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS).

Job Titles:

• Chancellor Faculty Fellow and Professor

Dan Work is a Chancellor Faculty Fellow and professor in civil and environmental engineering, computer science, and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. He has held research appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2010-17), Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (2015, 2020), Microsoft Research Redmond (2009), and Nokia Research Center Palo Alto (2007-09). Dr. Work pioneered methods for monitoring and controlling road traffic using vehicles, rather than fixed infrastructure, to sense and control road congestion. In 2015 he and his collaborators were the first to experimentally demonstrate that "phantom" traffic jams, which seemingly occur without an obvious cause but are due to human driving behavior, can be eliminated via control of a small fraction of automated vehicles in the flow. Work is a recognized transportation expert whose work has appeared in media outlets including ABC's Good Morning America, Reuters, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. Dr. Work received a 2018 Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering and a 2014 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He earned a BS from Ohio State in 2006, and an MS (2007) and Ph.D. (2010) from UC Berkeley, all in civil and environmental engineering.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Job Titles:

• Professor
• Professor / Projects

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor
• Chancellor
• Senior Advisor
• Associate Professor of Computer Science
• Project Leader of the Eclipse Foundation 's Generic Eclipse Modeling System

Dr. Jules White is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Dept. of Electrical Engi neering and Computer Science and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Generative AI in Education and Enterprise Solutions at Vanderbilt University. He was previously Associate Dean for Strategic Learning Programs at Vanderbilt, a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech where he won the Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award. His research has won 5 Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards. He has also published over 85 papers. Dr. White's research focuses on securing, opti mizing, and leverag ing data from mobile cyber-physical systems. His mobile cyber-physical systems research spans four key focus areas: (1) mobile security and data collection, (2) high-precision mobile augmented reality, (3) mobile device and supporting cloud infrastructure power and configuration optimiza tion, and (4) applications of mobile cyber-physical systems in multi-disciplinary domains, includ ing energy-optimized cloud computing, smart grid sys tems, healthcare/manufacturing security, next-generation construction technologies, and citi zen science. Dr. White's research has been licensed and transitioned to industry, where it won an In novation Award at CES 2013, attended by over 150,000 people, was a finalist for the Technical Achievement at Award at SXSW Interactive, and was a top 3 for mobile in the Accelerator Awards at SXSW 2013. His research is conducted through the Mobile Application computinG, optimizatoN, and secUrity Methods (MAGNUM) Group at Van derbilt University, which he di rects. Through his research efforts in model-driven engineering, Dr. White became the project leader of the Eclipse Foundation's Generic Eclipse Modeling System (GEMS). GEMS is a part of the Ec lipse Modeling Project that also contains the Eclipse Modeling Frame work (EMF). GEMS is dis tributed by over 45 mirrors in North America, Eu rope, Asia, and South America. The devel op ment of GEMS has been supported by industrial part ners, such as IBM, Lockheed Martin, Ray theon, and PrismTech. In collaboration with Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Dr. White has de veloped highly scalable particle swarm optimization techniques for optimizing the deployment of software in real-time aeronau tics platforms to reduce network traffic. Initial results from ap plying his algo rithms to a representative aeronautics platform have shown the potential to reduce network traf fic by over 25% and overall hardware footprint by 40%. Dr. White has also worked on dep loy ment modeling and optimization projects in the automotive and medical im aging do mains for Siemens AG. Dr. White's current work on deployment optimization for multi-core processors is supported by the National Science Foundation, Lockheed Martin, and the Air Force Research La boratories. Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Generative AI in Education and Enterprise Solutions, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor

Dr. Huang's group focuses on software engineering and human factors, including user cognition, sustainability for open source software, AI for software engineering, and software engineering education. Broadly, she solves problems to understand and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of software engineering activities. Her work spans software, hardware, medical imaging, eye tracking, and mobile sensing, collaborating with researchers from Psychology and Neuroscience, and research labs in CS industry. Her group also works on social aspects in software engineering community. Dr. Yu Huang received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Michigan in 2021. She received her MS in Computer Engineering from University of Virginia in 2015 and her BS in Aerospace Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in China in 2011.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Job Titles:

• Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Co - Associate Chair for Computer Engineering

Job Titles:

• Professor

Gautam Biswas conducts research in Intelligent Systems with primary interests in monitoring, control, and fault adaptivity of complex cyber-physical systems. In particular, his research focuses on Deep Reinforcement Learning, Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection methods, and Online Risk and Safety analysis applied to Air and Marine vehicles as well as Smart Buildings. His work, in conjunction with Honeywell Technical Center and NASA Ames, led to the NASA 2011 Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Technology and Innovation Group Award for Vehicle Level Reasoning System and Data Mining methods to improve aircraft diagnostic and prognostic systems. His research is supported by funding from the Army, NASA, and NSF. He has published extensively and currently has over 600 refereed publications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE Computer Society, Asia Pacific Society for Computers in Education, and the Prognostics and Health Management society.

Job Titles:

• Senior Research Scientist

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor

James (Jim) Weimer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is a member of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering. He is the Director of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Lab and the Medical Device Club, and serves as an Innovation Ambassador for Vanderbilt University. His research interests include the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems with application to learning-enabled medical systems, safe autonomy, and cyber-physical security. James holds a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and prior to joining Vanderbilt was faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He serves as an associate editor of the ACM Transaction on Cyber-Physical Systems and ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare. He is a co-founder of two medical device companies: Neuralert and Vasowatch. Areas of Expertise Internet-of-medical things, cyber-physical systems, cyber-physical security, academic entrepreneurship Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Generative AI in Education and Enterprise Solutions, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering

Job Titles:

• Professor of Computer Science
• Professor of Computer Science / Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering / Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University

Jonathan Sprinkle has been a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University since 2021. He is a member of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, where he serves on the Executive Council with responsibility for partnerships. His research interests and experience are in model-based approaches to cyber-physical systems, and he teaches courses ranging from systems modeling and control to mobile application development and software engineering. In 2022, he led the hardware team that enabled the largest coordinated driving experiment in history-100 cars with customized ACC controllers-in Nashville, TN on I-24. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, he was the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, and the Interim Director of the Transportation Research Institute. In 2020 he was named a Distinguished Scholar of the University of Arizona. From 2017-2019 he served as a Program Director in Cyber-Physical Systems and Smart & Connected Communities at the National Science Foundation in the CISE Directorate. In 2013 he received the NSF CAREER award. His work has an emphasis for industry impact, and he was recognized with the UA "Catapult Award" by Tech Launch Arizona in 2014, and in 2012 his team won the NSF I-Corps Best Team award. Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Member, ISIS Executive Council

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. Previously, I was a Senior Research Fellow in the Computer Science and Engineering Division at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I was engaged in a variety of research spanning security, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. Prior to UM, I was a Research Scientist in the Robust Low Power VLSI group at the University of Virginia. I received my PhD in Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia under the guidance of Wes Weimer. I work across a variety of disciplines, including systems security, software engineering and human studies, conversational artificial intelligence, and medical informatics. I received my MS in Computer Science at George Mason University in 2013. My advisor was Angelos Stavrou. I received my BS with Distinction in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2011.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Job Titles:

• Director, Institute for Software Integrated Systems, Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Taylor T. Johnson, PhD, PE (TN), is A. James and Alice B. Clark Foundation Chancellor Faculty Fellow, Director of Graduate Studies (CS PhD), and Associate Professor of Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CmpE), and Electrical Engineering (EE) in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) (previously the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)) in the School of Engineering (VUSE) at Vanderbilt University (since August 2021, Assistant Professor 2016-2021), where he directs the Verification and Validation for Intelligent and Trustworthy Autonomy Laboratory (VeriVITAL) and is a Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) and a Faculty Affiliate of the Data Science Institute (DSI). Taylor was previously an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of Texas at Arlington (September 2013 to August 2016). Taylor earned a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013, where he worked in the Coordinated Science Laboratory with Prof. Sayan Mitra, and earlier earned an MSc in ECE at Illinois in 2010 and a BSEE from Rice University in 2008. Taylor's research focus is developing formal verification techniques and software tools for cyber-physical systems (CPS), with a focus most recently on autonomous CPS that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) components, such as neural networks, for tasks ranging from sensing/perception through planning/control. Taylor has published around a hundred papers on these methods and their applications across CPS domains, such as power and energy systems, aerospace and avionics systems, automotive systems, transportation systems, and robotics, three of which were recognized with best/outstanding paper awards, from the IEEE and IFIP, and two of which were awarded Best Software Repeatability/Artifact Awards. Taylor's research aims to develop reliable embedded and cyber-physical systems by advancing and applying techniques and tools from formal methods, control theory, embedded systems, and software engineering. Taylor received the AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP) award to visit the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)'s Information Directorate in 2015, was a Visiting Faculty Research Program (VFRP) award fellow at AFRL's Information Directorate in 2014, and was a visiting graduate research assistant through an SFFP award at AFRL's Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base in 2011. Taylor is a 2018 and 2016 recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, a 2015 recipient of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII), and his research is / has been supported by AFRL, AFOSR, ARO, DARPA, NSA, NSF (CISE CCF/SHF, CNS/CPS; ENG ECCS/EPCN), NVIDIA, ONR, Toyota, and USDOT. Taylor has served on program committees and in different organizational roles for venues such as AAAI, CAV, CVPR, EMSOFT, FORMATS, HSCC, ICCV, NFM, SAIV, SPIN, RTSS, UAI, among many others, and is an Associate Editor of Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT). Taylor is co-founder of the Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP) and the International Competition on Verifying Continuous and Hybrid Systems (ARCH-COMP) category on Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network Control Systems (AINNCS).

Job Titles:

• Research Professor of Electrical Engineering

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Thomas Beckers is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, where he was member of the GRASP Lab, PRECISE Center and ASSET Center. In 2020, he earned his doctorate in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2010 and 2013, respectively, from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. In 2018, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a DAAD AInet fellow and was awarded with the Rhode & Schwarz Outstanding Dissertation prize. His research interests include physics-enhanced learning, nonparametric models, and safe learning-based control.

Job Titles:

• Chairman, Department of Computer Science, Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Professor With the Department of Electrical Engineering

Xenofon Koutsoukos is a professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a senior research scientist with the Institute for Software-Integrated Systems, Vanderbilt University. Before joining Vanderbilt, Dr. Koutsoukos was a Member of Research Staff in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) (2000-2002), working in the Embedded Collaborative Computing Area. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2000. His research work is in the area of cyber-physical systems with emphasis on formal methods, distributed algorithms, diagnosis and fault tolerance, and adaptive resource management. He has published numerous journal and conference papers and he is co-inventor of four US patents. He was the recipient of the NSF Career Award in 2004, the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009 from the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, and the 2011 NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) Associate Administrator (AA) Award in Technology and Innovation. He is a Fellow of IEEE.