The Computer Science professor was awarded a combined $1 million in NSF grants for two projects related to his computer systems research.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ardalan Amiri Sani has received two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants totaling nearly $1 million in 2016 for his computer systems research.

The first project, “Enhancing the Security and Performance of GPU Access in Web Browsers,” was? awarded $499,805 and is estimated to run through May 2019. This project will focus on the recent industry effort to use WebGL for popular web applications, despite security and performance concerns for users’ personal systems. Amiri Sani and fellow researchers will be working on developing systems techniques to improve the security of GPU-based graphics for web applications, without worsening performance.

The second project, “Taming Mobile Hardware & OS Diversity for Comprehensive Software Analysis,” is a collaborative effort between Amiri Sani’s team and researchers at UC Riverside. The grant totaling nearly $500,000 is estimated to run through September 2019. The researchers are looking into the problem of Android operating systems on mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and wearables, becoming increasingly diverse, as do the challenges for testing, debugging and analyzing such software. This project will help improve the quality and security of software on mobile systems via a cloud-based mobile farm service by leveraging virtual machines running on servers to provide a lower cost to providers and lower prices for users.