( FACULTY ACCOLADES ) Pramod Khargonekar, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and vice chancellor for research, was awarded the 2021 IEEE Control Systems Society’s Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize.
Assistant Professor Zhou Li won a five-year, $527,416 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Computer and Network Systems.
The Bode Lecture Prize annually recognizes distinguished contributions to control systems science and engineering. In addition to technical merit, IEEE also recognizes the broader impacts of contribution toward the benefit of society and IEEE CSS’s diversity and inclusiveness goals.
Li’s research focuses on internet system security, specifically data-driven security analytics, internet measurement, sidechannel analysis and Internet of Things (IoT) security. His CAREER funding will help advance his efforts to debug a fragmented domain name system (DNS) infrastructure.
Khargonekar is highly regarded for his research in systems and control theory, as well as applications to renewable energy and smart grid, manufacturing and neural engineering. He was honored with the IEEE Control Systems Award in 2019 for his outstanding contributions to robust and optimal control theory. He played an essential role in creating a state-spacebased theory for H-infinity optimal control, which is considered one of the major achievements in the field of control theory in the last 40 years. Recently, he has started exploring novel research directions at the confluence of machine learning and control. Khargonekar also was named to the California Council on Science and Technology’s board of directors. The council is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization established to respond to the governor, the legislature, and other state entities who request independent assessment of public policy issues affecting the state of California relating to science and technology.
4 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
DNS translates user-friendly names like www.google.com to computer-friendly IP addresses. Although it has been designed as a highly reliable infrastructure, it often fails – sometimes as a result of cyberattacks or censorship, other times because of software bugs – leading to user disruption and network outages. “We see more than trillions of requests on a single day processed by DNS, and the volume will keep rising, given that COVID-19 keeps pushing offline activities to online,” Li said. Li’s preliminary work found that 27.9% of DNS requests from one country to Google were intercepted by network adversaries. His project seeks to develop novel platforms, techniques and tools that enable holistic debugging of the entire DNS infrastructure, both at the network layer and software layer. Li plans to make public the results of his research by releasing data, code, methods and tools through open sources to democratize DNS and network debugging in general for researchers, industry partners and the public.
