The Information Networking Institute (INI)

We're proud to celebrate the graduation award winners of the MS36 class:

Shyamal Vaderia — Outstanding Student Service Award for a Teaching Assistant

Neelesh Bisht — Outstanding Student Service Award for a Research Assistant

Logan Shea O'Brien — INI Leadership Award

Danielle Wicklund — Innocent Habiyaremye Memorial Award

Each of these winners represents the INI core values and has contributed meaningfully to our culture of inclusive excellence. Congratulations!

It's been just over a month since our Director Dr. Dena Haritos Tsamitis gave the keynote address at the CAE Community Symposium in downtown Pittsburgh.

Thanks to our colleagues from across the country who traveled to the city of bridges to share ideas, build community and forge new collaborations for the future of our cybersecurity "neighborhood." We're proud to be your neighbor!

To continue our series on this year's thesis and research-based projects, we wanted to congratulate our M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering (MSMITE) grads for completing their defenses. Students who chose the Advanced study option and select to pursue a project or thesis conclude their work with a defense held in their final semester and share their work with students, faculty and staff.

This year, one MSMITE student successfully defended their work:

Qingzheng Wang: Towards Robust Spoken Language Identification

Today, we're celebrating two of our M.S. in Artificial Intelligence - Information Security (MSAIE-IS) students who recently defended their work to complete their Advanced study program. Congratulations!

Yuxiao Li: MACHA: An Efficient Multi-Agent Framework for Comprehensive Hallucination Assessment

Zeyang Zhang: Cross-Modal Learning Through Hierarchical Quantized Embeddings

In April, we were the regional host for the NSA - National Security Agency Center for Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cybersecurity Community Symposium here in Pittsburgh. The three-day event brought together faculty, staff and experts from across the CAE community to share insights and build their networks.

INI Director Dr. Dena Haritos Tsamitis gave the keynote address to kick off the event, reflecting on how Mr. Rogers's lessons on being a "good neighbor" apply to the cybersecurity community.

Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick also underscored the impact of the CAE community's work in recorded remarks.

We are continuing to highlight this year's thesis and research-based projects with two of our M.S. in Information Security (MSIS) students who successfully defended their work. Congratulations!

Logan O’Brien: Vulnerable by Design: Educational SmartContracts for Teaching Blockchain Security

Matthew Ung: An Exploratory ML-Assisted Approach to Deobfuscating Complied Executables

Congratulations to INI Assistant Teaching Professor Mohamed Farag, who been accepted into the inaugural cohort of the Google Higher Education Faculty AI Fellowship.

This competitive fellowship supports faculty who integrate AI research and discovery into their curriculum in order to enhance the experience of their students. Through activities beginning this summer, Farag aims to build students' critical thinking abilities while using AI to empower their learning.

Congratulations, Mohamed!

Congratulations to the Carnegie Mellon University MITREcorp eCTF team! This year's competition marks the fifth consecutive win for the the team — an unheard of feat in the competition. 💪 Congratulations also to faculty advisors Patrick Tague, Hanan Hibshi and Anthony Rowe. And thank you to all the alumni who helped advise the team.

INI team members included:

Keyur Aghao – MSIS

Gaurav C G – MSIS

Om Arora-Jain – MSIT-IS

Ryan Kim – MSIS

Jacob Lawrence – MSIS

Nishant Puri – MSIT-IS

Keshav Ravichandra Raju – MSIS

Chloe Taylor – MSIT-IS

Pritha Tiwari – MSIS

Adit Verma – M

Max Yin - MSIS

Mitchell Zhou – MSIS

Congratulations to our M.S. in Information Networking (MSIN) graduates who chose to complete a thesis or research-based project through the Advanced study option! These students conclude their work with a defense held in their final semester, where they get to share their work with fellow students, faculty and staff.

This year, two MSIN students successfully defended their work:

Xingci Gu: Develop an RPG on Unity3D for Release on Steam

Zepeng Zhao: A Persistent Megakernal Architecture for Multi-GPU LLM Interference

The INI Diploma Ceremony is one of the highlights of the year! With inspiring words from INI Director Dena Haritos Tsamitis and keynote speaker Aditi Pendharkar, we celebrated the 36th class. Congratulations to all of our new alumni and, thank you to the mothers and grandmothers who shared the day with us. 🎓

Congratulations also to our graduating students who were part of this year's winning MITREcorp eCTF team — a fifth win in a row!