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Category Archives: Research
CSE Faculty Receives “Best Reviewer Award” at CIKM 2021
Dr. Tamer Elsayed has received a “Best Reviewer Award” at the 30th International Conference on Information on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2021. The award was announced during the conference that was held online last week. The award was given to 30 reviewers out of more than 1,600 reviewers, according to the General Chairs of the conference.
Congratulations Dr. Tamer for the recognition!
CSE Researchers Receive Awards in QU Annual Research Forum and Exhibition
Three researchers from our CSE department have received awards in QU Annual Research Forum and Exhibition 2021. The event brings together students, researchers and academics from the University’s colleges, research centers and institutions, in addition to partners and stakeholders, to assess, review and discuss QU’s research outputs and activities.
The device is developed as part of a collaborative research project titled “Smart assistive tools for people with visual impairments”. Visually impaired users can easily wear it on their head and utilize the device to get assistance for navigation, object recognition, obstacle detection, and text recognition especially in indoor areas. The developed system can provide real-time guidance and notification to the user.
Moreover, Nandhini Subramanian (Research Assistant), Jayakanth Kunhoth (PhD Student and Graduate Research Assistant), Prof. Somaya Al Maadeed (Supervisor and Lead PI of the project), and Prof. Ahmed Bouridane (Professor at University of Sharjah, UAE) won the Best Research Poster Award (Faculty and PostDoc Category) for the poster titled “Stego-eHealth: An eHealth System for Secured Transfer of Medical Images Using Image Steganography”.
The work aims to secure the medical data of the patients using image steganography when transferring through untrusted channels. At the sending end, the medical images are embedded in a normal natural scene image and at the receiving end the embedded medical image is extracted for easy access. This work was part of QNRF NPRP11S-0113- 180276 project led by Prof. Somaya.
Congratulations to all the winners!
CSE Faculty Receives QU Research Excellence Award
Prof. Somaya Al-Maadeed has been granted the QU Research Excellence Award in Sciences & Engineering. The awards is were presented at the Qatar University Annual Research Forum & Exhibition 2021 by Dr. Hassan Al-Derham, the president of Qatar University.
The Research Excellence Award was established to publicly recognize, encourage, and promote the sustained research of QU faculty members and researchers that has significant impact on society, industry, and related disciplines, meeting the vision and mission of the University. The award in 2021 is granted to faculty members and researchers based on their research during the past 5 years, i.e., since January 2016 to present.
Congratulations Dr. Somaya!
A new patent received by CSE faculty
Inventors from Qatar University: Dr Armstrong Nhlabatsi, Eng. Rachael Fernandez, Eng. Alaa Hussein, Dr. Noora Fetais, and Dr Khaled Khan received a new patent titled: “Threat-Specific Security Risk Evaluation for Networked Systems”.
Existing security risk evaluation approaches do not consider specific security requirements of individual organizations in the security risk evaluation. This patent has defined a threat-specific risk evaluation approach that uses various security attributes of the cloud as well as the organization-specific security requirements. The patented approach allows a security administrator of the cloud provider to make fine-grained decisions for selecting mitigation strategies in order to protect the outsourced computing assets of individual organizations based on their specific security needs against specific threats. On the other hand, the proposed approach enables security administrators to compute a range of more effective organization-specific countermeasures with respect to the importance of security requirements and threats. The experimental evaluation results demonstrate that effective security solutions vary due to specific threats prioritized by different organizations for an application in the cloud. Further, the proposed approach is not limited to only the cloud-based systems, but can easily be adopted to other networked systems. We have also developed a software tool to support the proposed approach. This patented approach is an improved technique for monitoring the security of network. The team hopes this invention will make evaluation of network security risk more effective and robust.
Congratulations to the patent team!
PDRA7 Award to CSE Faculty and Postdoc
Prof. Khaled Shaban, as a Primary Research Mentor, and Dr. Alaa Abdellatif, as a Postdoctoral Fellow, are awarded two years funding for their proposal in the seventh cycle of Postdoctoral Research Award (PDRA) from Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). The project is titled “AI-driven Secured Demand Response in Next Generation Smart Grid Using Blockchain and 5G Networks”. It is one of two PDRA proposals awarded by QNRF to Qatar University in this cycle. More details on the project can be found here.
New Patent Granted for CSE Faculty in Collaboration with KINDI Center
Dr. Khaled Khan and Dr. Noora Fetais from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) have been awarded a patent titled “Methods and Systems for Monitoring Network Security” in collaboration with KINDI Center for Computing Research in the College of Engineering at Qatar University.
The Qatar National Research Funds has supported this research under National Priority Research Program (NPRP8-531-1-111). Dr. Khaled and Dr Noora acted as the Lead PI and PI of the project respectively. Dr. Armstrong Nhlabatsi from KINDI also participated in the research project. They collaborated with the researchers from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and the University of Queensland (Australia).
Modern networks are becoming more and more dynamic, such as frequent changes compared to the traditional static networks (e.g., hosts addition and removal, vulnerability change, applications and services update, and attack surface change). In a dynamic network, the configuration of at least one of the hosts or edges changes over time. The dynamic network is a network selected from a group of configured components including cloud computing, a software-defined networking arrangement, or an Internet of Things network. As network components change over time, the security posture of the network also changes, as vulnerabilities associated with the network components shift accordingly. Hence, it is of paramount importance to be able to assess the security of dynamic networks in order to understand and further enhance the security.
This patented approach is a new technique for monitoring the security of a computing network, which includes a plurality of hosts and a plurality of edges which link connected hosts. The method comprises capturing and storing network state information in response to at least one of the time-driven trigger, an event-driven trigger or a user-driven trigger. The method further comprises storing security-related data which is indicative of the change in the security of the network during the time window for a user to monitor the change in the security of the network. Detecting a change in the security of the network comprises at least one of the following events: the addition of a new host to the network; the removal of a host from the network; the addition of a new edge to the network; the removal of an edge from the network; the addition of a vulnerability to a host in the network; or the removal of a vulnerability from a host in the network. The method calculates at least one security metric for the network and a weight value for at least one of the components in the network. The approach is capable of capturing such critical changes and reflecting the modified security posture in order to precisely assess the security of dynamic networks.
