“I am pleased to be able to recognize all of this hard work,” said Dean Vivek Sarkar during the ceremony.

One student, two staff members, and four faculty members were nominated by their SCP peers and received awards for their achievements over the past year. 

Student Solves Real World Problems

Yibin Yang (Ph.D. CS 2025) was awarded a 2025 Dissertation Award for his thesis on zero-knowledge proofs in real-world problems. SCP Professor and Senior Associate Chair Vlad Kolesnikov advised Yang and acknowledged that Yang’s work advances the field of cryptography. 

Yang contributed to the advancement of zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computations, while also building toolchains that are faster and more usable than existing systems. His work earned a distinguished paper award at the 2023 ACM CCS, and he also served as an RSAC Security Scholar.

Staff Lead the Way

In the staff category, Mary Helen Hayes was awarded the Outstanding Staff Leadership Award, and Gina Anderson received the Ruthie Book Outstanding Staff Team Member Award.

The Outstanding Staff Leadership Award is given to a full-time administrative staff member in recognition of an outstanding record of leadership that has resulted in a significant positive impact on the College of Computing, the Institute, or the computing community. Hayes was nominated by four faculty and staff members for this award for her steady presence in SCP since she began her role as director of research operations in 2024. 

The Ruthie Book Outstanding Staff Team Member Award is presented to a staff member in recognition of their outstanding performance in honor of Ruthie Book, who exemplified excellence in her work. Anderson was nominated by SCP faculty and staff for her outstanding leadership and mentorship.

Both received praise for their hard work from the college as well as from their supervisor, Senior Academic Officer Jan Morian. 

“I am so incredibly proud of our staff in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy who won awards this year at the College of Computing Annual Awards ceremony,” she said.

“Mary Helen Hayes and Regina Anderson are truly outstanding staff members who exemplify Georgia Tech’s values. Their leadership has contributed substantially to the success of the school.”

Cybersecurity Faculty Net Four Awards

The College of Computing also recognized four SCP faculty members for excellence in teaching and research during the college’s annual award ceremony. 

Assistant Professor Teodora Baluta received the Junior Faculty Teaching Award for developing a new graduate-level course that brought together generative artificial intelligence (AI) security, adversarial machine learning, cryptography, and differential privacy. Her nominator, SCP Associate Professor Vassilis Zikas, said the course bridged a critical gap in a rapidly evolving area of computing. 

For his role in leading Team Atlanta to victory in the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge, Professor Taesoo Kim received the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award. His nominator, Regents Professor Wenke Lee, praised the team’s performance, which not only won the competition but also beat the combined score of all other competitors. The AI developed by Team Atlanta is now open sourced with the Open Source Security Foundation. 

Associate Professor Frank Li received the Junior Faculty Research Award for establishing world-class research BEES Lab at Georgia Tech. One of his nominators, Associate Professor Saman Zonouz, put Li’s name forward for his work empirically evaluating and improving internet security and privacy from an operational standpoint. 

Finally, Associate Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio received the Mid-Career Faculty Research Award. Zikas nominated him for establishing internationally recognized research in cybersecurity forensics, malware analysis, AI security, and software supply chain security. Saltaformaggio’s research highlights include the discovery of over $2 billion in stolen funds on the Ethereum blockchain. 

"We know SCP faculty conduct highly impactful research that is of the highest quality,” said SCP Interim Chair Mustaque Ahamad. “Our faculty receiving research awards at all levels recognizes this and shows how we are working to realize SCP’s vision of creating security for everyone and everything."

The College recognized outstanding achievements across faculty, staff, and students during the 35th Annual College of Computing Awards celebration, held on April 20 in the Klaus Atrium. Hosted by Dean Vivek Sarkar, the luncheon highlighted significant contributions to the College community, with several honorees from the School of Computing Instruction (SCI). 

Now, the team is working with the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to ensure that its breakthrough doesn’t remain confined to a competition environment. The team’s new initiative, OSS-CRS, aims to standardize and operationalize cyber reasoning systems (CRSs) for real-world use.

“The AI Cyber Challenge pushed the boundaries of autonomous software security, with seven teams developing systems capable of finding and remediating vulnerabilities at scale,” said Andrew Chin, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student and lead on the OSS-CRS program. 

“However, after the competition’s conclusion, it has been difficult to apply these advancements to the open-source community due to infrastructure incompatibilities and the lack of long-term maintenance for the open-sourced CRS implementations.”

To address this gap, Georgia Tech’s Systems Software Lab (SSLab), directed by Professor Taesoo Kim, is leading the development of OSS-CRS, which provides both a common framework for CRS development and the infrastructure needed to deploy these systems seamlessly across open-source projects.

As part of this effort, the team has ported its competition-winning system, Atlantis, into the OSS-CRS framework. The move makes it compatible with laptops and other everyday machines with flexible resource and budget configurations.

Interoperability is also central to the framework’s design. Atlantis can be combined with other CRSs to improve performance, including systems developed by fellow AIxCC finalists and newer agentic, command-line-based tools. This modular approach reflects a key lesson the team learned from the competition: collaboration between systems can outperform any single solution.

OSS-CRS has been accepted as a sandbox project within OpenSSF’s AI/ML Security Working Group, a milestone that brings added technical guidance and community support to the project. This includes:

• Access to mentorship
• Dedicated working group meetings
• Broader visibility through industry events, publications, and outreach efforts

The collaboration will also foster stronger connections with open-source maintainers, helping streamline vulnerability disclosure and remediation workflows.

They would normally get this in their natural habitats while foraging for food and staying alert to predators that might target calves.

However, the four elephants reside at Zoo Atlanta, so they don’t have to worry about these things.

That’s why zoo caretakers are always on the lookout for better ways to help their elephants exercise their brains.

The caretakers at Zoo Atlanta found one when they met Arianna Mastali, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. Mastali designed an audio enrichment wall to help stimulate Zoo Atlanta’s elephants.

Many zoos build concrete enrichment walls to foster elephant problem-solving and critical thinking. The walls usually have holes for the elephants to reach through with their trunks as they search for food, treats, or playful objects on the other side.

Mastali enhanced Zoo Atlanta’s enrichment wall by adding an interactive audio component. A nearby speaker system emits distinctive low-frequency tones when an elephant sticks its trunk into a hole.

“They’re intelligent creatures that require a lot of complexity in their habitat,” Mastali said. “We wanted to add to that complexity while giving them more control.”

Experimenting in the Wild

Mastali’s system uses cameras and computer vision to detect when an elephant’s trunk is inside a hole and then sends a signal to the speakers to play a sound.

Mastali is a member of the Georgia Tech Animal Lab, directed by School of IC professor Melody Jackson. The lab often uses sensing technology to enhance animal wellness.

Mastali said she tried incorporating sensing devices into her project several times. She constructed an insert made of PVC pipe and attached a sensor to its base that used infrared beams to detect the elephant’s trunk.

However, she said it was difficult to account for the elephants’ strength. Their trunks would break the insert after a day or two. 

She pivoted toward computer vision to remove the risk of damage and keep the enrichment wall as close to natural as possible. 

“A big lesson we learned was that using existing materials the elephants are already familiar with was the best way to do things, and it simplified our design process,” she said.

Shane Rosse, a student in Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program, assisted Mastali with the computer vision component.

Enhancing Environmental Enrichment

Mastali observed the elephants’ behavior at the wall seven days before and seven days after the installation of the audio enrichment system.

The number of times the elephants approached the wall after installation increased by 176%, and time spent at the wall increased by 71%

“We weren’t sure at first if they would care that much, so it was great to see how much time they spent at the wall, especially our less dominant females,” said Kirby Miller, senior elephant caretaker at Zoo Atlanta. “They seem to like it the most.”

Miller said the elephants used to only approach the wall when they knew there was food behind it. That started to change after the audio enrichment system was installed.

“We would be off somewhere else, and we’d hear the speaker playing the sounds, and we knew there wasn’t any food back there,” Miller said. “Tara had her trunk in one of the holes, just listening to the sound. That let us know they do like it, and they’re very curious about it.”

Miller said because elephants have sharp memories and acute senses of hearing and smell, their habitats must be designed with that in mind.

Zoo Atlanta’s African Savanna elephant habitat was redesigned in 2019. In addition to the enrichment wall, it includes a bathing pond, two waterfalls, and swing boom devices that hold hay for elephants to eat as they would in the wild.

Miller said elephants sheltered at any zoo or conservation would benefit from enrichment devices enhanced by technology.

“I think anything they can participate in that gives them choice and control is great for all zoo elephants,” she said. “It depends on the elephants, but with our elephants, they can hear much higher frequencies than we can. That noise isn’t that loud for us, but for them, they’re feeling that noise, and they can hear much more, which makes it more stimulating for them.”