PhD student wins Fellowship for her work in cloud storage

Tama Moni — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 16:24:43 +0000

PhD student wins Fellowship for her work in cloud storage Tama Moni Thu, 09/15/2022 - 12:24

Ioanna Karantaidou

Ioanna Karantaidou, a PhD student in George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing’s Computer Science Department, has won a one-year fellowship from Protocol Labs, where she will work on their Fielcoin project, investigating innovations in cloud storage. Her fellowship is for $60k, which will cover tuition, travel, healthcare costs, and salary.

Cloud storage is dominated by a few large organizations and Filecoin seeks to decentralize this important service by allowing numerous small entities to provide storage –– even someone with a hard drive could sign up as a provider. But while users may be comfortable saving files in an established company such as Google Drive, they may not have the same trust in a decentralized service with which they are unfamiliar. Karantaidou’s work centers on establishing protocols that will test to ensure service providers are behaving honestly and incentivize them to do so. The goal is for these measures to ultimately lead to greater client trust and more widespread use of decentralized cloud storage services.

Karantaidou says her journey into the field “makes sense.” Growing up in Greece she enjoyed math and wanted to study computers, so got involved in informatics. She says, “In Greece, you don’t have a double major, so I have two bachelor’s degrees - in math and computer science - and cryptography is at the intersection of those two. It was my favorite class in both programs.”

Karantaidou’s advisor at Mason is Foteini Baldimtsi, an assistant professor in the computer science department.

Topics

cloud computing

Fellowships

computer science

PhD IT student receives Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Fellowship

Martha Bushong — Tue, 24 May 2022 17:21:31 +0000

PhD IT student receives Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Fellowship Martha Bushong Tue, 05/24/2022 - 13:21

In This Story

Alex Brodsky

Xu Han, a PhD student in Information Science and Technology, has won a Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Fellowship.

The COVES Fellowship is a 12-week program that matches graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to a legislative, executive agency, or policy office within Virginia. COVES Fellows are generally STEM graduate students or postdoctoral fellows from participating universities across the state. Criteria to be selected include career interests, a desire to learn, and scientific integrity.

As part of his PhD dissertation, Han is working on an innovative and exciting topic: How to democratize innovation by allowing entrepreneurs without design and manufacturing expertise to bring their ideas to markets quickly, thus enabling true cloud manufacturing. The idea is to develop markets of virtual things – parameterized products and services that can be searched, composed, and optimized.

Han will serve his 12-week fellowship at the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. He says he is interested in how modern information technologies impact human lives, how we can mitigate the issues with socially, economically, and technically sound solutions, and advancement of human-centered technological development and usage.

“Xu has a unique comprehensive background,” says Professor Alex Brodsky, Han’s advisor. “This includes business administration and the mathematical and computing expertise necessary for developing enabling decision guidance systems.”

The first COVES fellowships were awarded in 2020 and Han is the first College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) student to receive one. His stipend is funded by CEC and the Office of the Provost. During his fellowship, Han will receive training and mentorship from the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine

Learn more about the COVES Fellowship

Topics

Fellowships