LAS Spring Dean’s Lecture: Designing Secure Fleets of Drones: Possibilities, Challenges, and Limitations

CATEGORIES: News, Research
March 12, 2019, 8:00pm | Sun Room, Memorial Union
Borzoo Bonakdarpour sitting at computer displaying drone grid image.

Iowa State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will host a lecture presented by Borzoo Bonakdarpour, assistant professor of computer science, on Tuesday, March 12th, 2019 at 8:00 p.m. in the Iowa State University Memorial Union Sun Room. The lecture is part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Lecture Series.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, are expected to play a significant role in future technologies, especially when programmed in teams. Drone fleets could aid with surveillance and data collection for crops or wildlife, search and rescue missions, border security, deliveries, and more, but they also present challenges and vulnerabilities. Iowa State assistant professor of computer science Borzoo Bonakdarpour will discuss his work designing programmed drone fleets that are efficient enough for large-scale projects but also safe, secure, and adaptable.

Bonakdarpour‘s main area of research is dependable distributed computing, focusing on distributed optimization, monitoring, and code generation as well as runtime monitoring of security and privacy policies. He has published more than 80 articles and papers in top journals and at conferences, and has received two Best Paper Awards, and two Best Instructor Awards. He chaired the Program Committee of the 18th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS) in 2016, and the 14th International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV) in 2014. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2009 where his dissertation, “Automated Revision of Distributed and Real-Time Programs,” was nominated for the 2010 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

The lecture is free and open to the public.