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Research Statement PDF

The researcher has previously worked on enhancing privacy and security in applications and networks through watermarking 3D graphical objects, improving performance and anonymity in Tor networks, and developing a reinforcement learning approach for circuit scheduling in Tor. Their goals for future research include exploring the use of swarm intelligence algorithms to improve multi-agent reinforcement learning for decentralized agents in non-stationary environments, starting with simple game theory problems and developing communication models between agents. They also aim to recruit and mentor graduate students to help achieve their research plans and enhance success.

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Aliya Tabassum
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61 views2 pages

Research Statement PDF

The researcher has previously worked on enhancing privacy and security in applications and networks through watermarking 3D graphical objects, improving performance and anonymity in Tor networks, and developing a reinforcement learning approach for circuit scheduling in Tor. Their goals for future research include exploring the use of swarm intelligence algorithms to improve multi-agent reinforcement learning for decentralized agents in non-stationary environments, starting with simple game theory problems and developing communication models between agents. They also aim to recruit and mentor graduate students to help achieve their research plans and enhance success.

Uploaded by

Aliya Tabassum
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Research Statement

Previous Research Experience


My research aims to address the question, ’How to provide users with high-performing secure
applications avoiding the increasing threats to privacy and ownership?’ My past research has helped
to answer this question by
{ Presenting a non-blind watermarking scheme for 3D graphical objects (meshes). The non-
blind watermarking scheme is known to be more secure than blind ones since the original and
watermarked models are needed for extraction. In our scheme we used the model’s prominent
feature points to divide the model into separate segments, these feature segments are then
projected from 3D representation to the 3 main 2D-Planes. The watermark embedding is
done in the frequency domain of these projections. We designed our work to support parallel
implementation, and utilize the computing power of GPUs for better performance.
{ Enhancing the performance and security of anonymous communication networks to preserve the
privacy of the users on the internet. The privacy of Internet users is at increasing risk with
the advances in surveillance techniques. Users’ online behavior, activities, and even personal
information are being tracked by ISPs and major tech companies. In response to the increasing
need for preserving and protecting the privacy of online users, anonymity networks were developed.
Tor anonymity network is a low-latency anonymity network that has gained quite a good reputation
over the past years and is being adopted by thousands of users. With the great attention Tor’s
network is getting, the original design of Tor was proven to have performance-limiting issues.
With the motivation for addressing the performance limitation in Tor, we present QuicTor, a
datagram-based design to solve Tor’s transport-layer limiting issue. We evaluated the performance
of QuicTor in comparison to vanilla Tor as well as other performance-enhancing proposals. QuicTor
achieved significant performance improvements for interactive applications as well as streaming
applications. Running Tor over a datagram-based protocol entails a careful security analysis. In
this article, we assess the behavior of QuicTor under side-channel attacks aiming to de-anonymize
Tor’s clients. We show that the performance improvements brought by QuicTor do not reduce
the anonymity of clients under the investigated types of attacks.
Tor was mainly developed as a low-latency network to support interactive applications such as
web browsing and messaging applications. However, a considerable percentage of Tor traffic is
consumed by bandwidth-acquisitive applications such as BitTorrent. This results in an unfair
allocation of the available bandwidth and significant degradation in the Quality-of-service (QoS)
delivered to users. In this paper, we present a QoS-aware deep reinforcement learning approach
for Tor’s circuit scheduling (QDRL). We propose a design that coalesces the two scheduling levels
originally presented in Tor and addresses it as a single resource allocation problem. We use the
QoS requirements of different applications to set the weight of active circuits passing through
a relay. Furthermore, we propose a set of approaches to achieve the optimal trade-off between
system fairness and efficiency. We designed and implemented a reinforcement-learning-based
scheduling approach (TRLS), a convex-optimization-based scheduling approach (CVX-OPT),

Lamiaa Basyoni
H (+974) 7744 6604 • B [email protected] 1/2
and an average-rate-based proportionally fair heuristic (AR-PF). We also compare the proposed
approaches with basic heuristics and with the implemented scheduler in Tor. We show that our
reinforcement-learning-based approach (TRLS) achieved the highest QoS-aware fairness level with
a resilient performance to the changes in an environment with a dynamic nature such as the Tor
network.

Research Goals
While working on my Ph.D. research, we faced the challenge of a dynamic environment in which we
can not observe the entire state. With technologies like reinforcement learning, a non-stationary
environment with imperfect information poses a challenge, especially for multi-agent algorithms.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have attracted researchers’ interest for their
performance in solving optimization problems and other machine learning and self-learning gaming
applications. For post-doc research, I aim to explore the possibility of using swarm intelligence
(SI) algorithms to improve decentralized MARL algorithms in non-stationary environments. o be
successful as a starting faculty, I plan to start with simple ’unit’ problems where I can model the
learning goal for the decentralized agents using game-theory strategies. After modeling the learning
goal, I will need to define the communication model between the agents, with the use of SI algorithm
to optimize the policy update method for all agents.
After building the model, I will move to the implementation and experimenting phase to prove the
effectiveness of the proposed model.
Furthermore, I recognize the importance of recruiting and mentoring graduate students to make my
research plans a success. I plan to quickly develop positive working and mentoring relationships to
enhance both my own and my student’s success.

Lamiaa Basyoni
H (+974) 7744 6604 • B [email protected] 2/2

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