Congratulations to Janne Lindqvist, an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers as well as a Computer Science graduate faculty member, on his new NSF CAREER award for the project titled "CAREER: Science of Security for Mobile User Authentication." This is a five-year $507,568.00 award. These prestigious awards are in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Janne will solve transformative questions in the security and usability of user authentication. The project blends a multifaceted research agenda, which will integrate statistical theory with empirical studies to advance the science of authentication. This is an interdisciplinary project that requires computational knowledge from signal processing and machine learning, information about threats from security engineering, and the understanding of usability from human factors and human-computer interaction. The project is motivated by the following observations: 1) people are switching from desktops to smartphones as their main computing and Internet platform, 2) mobile platforms provide opportunities for ingenious authentication methods, and 3) although the scientific and engineering community is producing many solutions to mobile authentication, the underlying trade-offs and science behind mobile authentication are not well understood. As part of this project, Janne will be developing a unified approach towards evaluation user authentication systems. It is expected that the findings from this project will also illuminate new methods to improve lightweight mobile-friendly authentication.
More details on the award at the NSF page here