March 28, 2023 was an exciting day at CMKL University as we welcomed a special guest to our campus for the first presentation in our 2023 distinguished lecture series. Professor Virgil D. Gligor from Carnegie Mellon University co-directed the CMU CyLab cybersecurity and privacy institute between 2008 and 2015. He has also chaired more than a dozen conferences, including the IEEE Security and Privacy, the ACM CCS, and the Internet Society’s NDSS.

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The event was attended by high school and university students as well as our own faculty members. Dr.Virgil D. Gligor spoke for an hour on the topic of "Zero Trust in Zero Trust?" and provided a wealth of information on the thorny nature of cybersecurity challenges. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) has been proposed as a cybersecurity standard by the U.S. government, but Dr. Gligor offered convincing arguments that ZTA — that is, an architecture in which every component is completely isolated and protected from attacks from any other component – cannot exist in practice. On the other hand, he presented evidence that the efforts to build zero trust systems can produce benefits in terms of faster recovery from malware exploits. A lively Q&A session followed the talk, where audience members had the opportunity to ask Dr. Gligor questions about his research and perspectives on the topic and related issues. The session was informative and engaging, leaving our students and faculty members with much to ponder.

After the talk, Dr. Gligor toured CMKL University facilities and our showcase of electrical and computer engineering student projects. The ongoing project "Millimeter Wave Motion Capture" by Shaun Stevens incorporates sensing technology in order to perform human motion capture. "Incorporating Physics Priors to Track Objects in Warehouses" by Kawisorn Kamtue investigates how we can incorporate classical models of object motion into a deep learning framework. "Human in the Loop Active Learning for Recycling Bottle Classification" by Yongqi Zhou optimizes deep learning models to meet operational needs in a real industrial environment. This project is intended to distinguish the recyclable from non-recyclable bottles, with generalization to different data sets. 

The day was filled with stimulating conversations and insightful discussions. As the world races toward digitalization, cybersecurity becomes increasingly critical. Dr. Gligor’s topic “Zero Trust in Zero Trust” is intriguing and important. To read more on this topic, please follow this link. 

We want to express our gratitude to Dr. Gligor for sharing his expertise and knowledge with us. It was truly an honor to host him, and we hope his experience with us was as memorable as it was for us. We warmly welcome Dr. Gligor to visit us again in the future!

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