Assistant Professor of Computer Science Qi Alfred Chen recently received awards for the “Most Engaging” and “Most Amusing” talk at the 2019 USENIX Summit on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec ’19), held in conjunction with USENIX Security ’19. HotSec brings together researchers across computer security disciplines to discuss the state of the art, focusing on future directions and emerging areas.

In his talk, “Ghost Cars & Fake Obstacles: First Look at Control Software Stack Security in Emerging Smart Transportation,” Chen highlighted new security problems that can cause unsafe driving decisions and massive traffic jams in real-world autonomous driving and smart transportation systems. He also discussed future research directions for this problem space.

“I am very excited about the two awards, since HotSec is one of the most famous workshops on emerging security research topics,” says Chen. “This demonstrates a high interest from the research community about my recent work on the security of autonomous driving and smart transportation.” He is working to build a community around this urgent research topic to ensure “a safe future with our everyday transportation.”