Recognizing Undergraduate ECE Student for Machine Learning and Cloud Computing Research

Anthony Byrne Receives MIT Best Lighting Talk Award

By Shereen Abubakr (QST ’18)

ECE undergraduate Anthony Byrne (ENG ’19) received the Best Lightning Talk Award at the 2017 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference. The aim of the conference is to bring undergraduates from around the world together to advance technology by presenting, discussing, and developing solutions. His talk, “DeltaSherlock: Cloud Integrity Through Machine Learning”, explored the use of machine learning in cloud software discovery and was based on a paper he co-authored for the 2016 IEEE Big Data Conference. Byrne was selected from a group of 11 presenters to be the sole recipient of the Best Lightning Talk Award.

In 2016, Byrne joined BU Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Performance and Energy Aware Computing Lab (PEACLab) as an undergraduate researcher under Prof. Ayse Coskun. He worked alongside other PEACLab researchers on the DeltaSherlock project until 2017, when he began working on PEACLab’s “Silver Bullet” project, which compares the performance of the original DeltaSherlock system to that of other cloud software discovery methods. Byrne, proud of his team’s research efforts, explains, “I think what’s coolest about this research is that it mixes machine learning and cloud computing — two young and exciting technologies that are quickly becoming critical to the IT infrastructure supporting our governments, businesses, and even smartphones — in a way that nobody has really explored before”.

Byrne attributes the Best Lightning Talk Award to his collaborators at the lab. “None of this work would be even remotely possible without the guidance of my mentor, Prof. Ayse K. Coskun.” Byrne also attributes his success to his fellow researchers at PEACLab, including John Knollmeyer (CE ’17), Dr. Hao Chen, and ECE Research Scientist Ata Turk. Additionally, he recalls his collaboration with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as an invaluable experience.

Byrne’s project was funded by IBM TJ Watson Research Center, the Lutchen Fellowship, and BU UROP.