Red Hat Collaboratory Announces 2022 Student Research Projects

Led by BU undergraduates, the open-source projects aim to improve security, efficiency, and intelligence of computing systems.

BY GINA MANTICA 

The Red Hat Collaboratory is excited to announce newly funded Student Research Projects. As part of Boston University’s expanded partnership with Red Hat, the Student Research Projects aim to provide BU students with research and experiential learning opportunities that advance open source projects in cloud computing, systems engineering infrastructure, and security. “It was extremely hard for the review community to select among the robust group of strong applicants, and we are excited that the Red Hat Collaboratory may benefit from these students’ research,” said Ari Trachtenberg, a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Systems Engineering who was instrumental in developing the funding program.

Learn more about the recently funded projects, below. 

Fine-Grained, Automated Security Detection via Semi-Supervised Learning

Nengneng Yu, an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering, in collaboration with Yajie Zhou, a PhD student in Computer Engineering, aims to detect and recover the attack stories behind security incidents (e.g., advanced persistent threat) using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Supervised by Alan Liu, an Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, this project will help security analysts and engineers uncover and remediate security vulnerabilities within distributed environments.

Network-Accelerated In-Memory Key-Value Store Live Migration

Julia Hua, an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering, in collaboration with Zeying Zhu, a PhD student in Computer Engineering, aims to develop an efficient open-source software migration system to meet demands for high throughput and low latency in the cloud. Supervised by Alan Liu, an Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, this project will create a prototype that uses lower network bandwidth and incurs smaller central processing unit (CPU) footprints compared to other state-of-the-art migration systems.

Real Time Quality Assurance

Quan Pham, an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering, aims to develop plugins for the Jupyter Notebook environment that will analyze code and provide real-time feedback on software that is in development. Supervised by Gianluca Stringhini, an Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, this project will create a user-friendly environment within which developers can write safer and more efficient software before the code enters the Quality Assurance or Deployment phase.

Red Hat Unikernel Secrecy Project

Ethan Klein, an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering, aims to develop a Unikernel implementation of Secrecy, a multi-party computation (MPC) platform that enables multiple parties to perform shared computations on private data without sharing their actual data. Supervised by Orran Krieger, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, this project will exploit unikernel-specific optimizations to improve the performance of Secrecy and increase communication speeds during data analysis.

Practical Programming of FPGAs with Open Source Tools: Test-Code Generation and Guided Search through Supervised Learning

Xiteng Yao, an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering, aims to improve an open source programming tool flow, known as LLVM, using reinforcement learning. Supervised by Martin Herbordt, a Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, this project will enable more efficient field-programmable gate array (FPGA) application programming and make strides towards Programmability and Performance-Portability (PPP).

For more information on the Red Hat Collaboratory’s opportunities for students, click here.