Congratulations to Dr. Xiali Hei for getting an NSF Award

Dr. Xiali Hei has received a faculty fellowship that would allow her and her female graduate student Liqun Shan to visit the PRECISE center at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been awarded $286,453.00 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the RII Track-4 program.

Advances in health care increasingly involve specialized hardware and software such as pacemakers and insulin pumps. However, these advances can introduce new risks, including physical-level attacks like EMI attacks. Clearly, patient safety depends on reliable and secure hardware and software.

“Medical cyber–physical systems (MCPS) require high security because they are safety critical. This proposal aims to address the threats with systematic and general approaches by enhancing the hardware and software co-design. The outcomes of this project will enhance the understanding of the security and reliability of medical cyber-physical systems under intentional EMI attacks. The training and hands-on experience on cutting-edge technologies and the collaborations established via this program will allow the PI to establish a highly productive and reputable cyber-physical system security laboratory and contribute to the inter-disciplinary research at UL Lafayette,” said Dr. Xiali Hei, an Assistant Professor at ULL’s School of Computing and Informatics, who is the PI of the project.

“The proposed studies will advance the methodology and design principles to ensure the real-time reliability of medical cyber-physical systems in the presence of intentional Electromagnetic Inference (EMI) attacks on analog medical sensors such as glucose sensors. This project will lay a solid foundation for reliable medical cyber-physical systems that rely on real-time sensing and control. The proposed approaches will advance understanding of designing secure and reliable systems with imperfect medical analog sensors,” she added.

More information about this award is available at the NSF Website.