February 2023 Statler Circuit: Department Digest and Awards

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering  

Ram Zaveri, a senior computer science major from Surat, India, received the Dan Drew Award from the Upsilon Pi Epsilon International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines. The award recognizes students who have made significant contributions to their local UPE chapters and related organizations. Zaveri joined WVU UPE last year and was recently elected as the chapter president. He is also part of the Vision and Learning Lab at WVU, where he conducts research on computer vision tasks, and machine learning concepts. Zaveri received $4,000 as the sole recipient of the 2022 Dan Drew Award, UPE’s first named award that honors the legacy of UPE pioneer Dan Drew. 

Anurag Srivastava, chairperson and professor in Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, was the author of a book that was recently published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Wiley. “Cyber Infrastructure for the Smart Electric Grid” delivers a comprehensive overview of the fundamental principles of smart grid operation and control, smart grid technologies, including sensors, communication networks, computation, data management, and cyber security, and the interdependencies between the component technologies on which a smart grid’s security depends. The book offers readers the opportunity to critically analyze the smart grid infrastructure needed to sense, communicate, compute, and control in a secure way. 

Three alums from the Statler College received the best overall conference paper award at the 2022 IEEE Homeland Security Symposium for their research on face morphed images. The paper, "Juvenile Morph Dataset: A study of Attack Detectability and Recognition Vulnerability," outlined how the group used morphed images of juveniles to create a dataset that help strengthen facial recognition systems that are used to identify fake passports and ID cards. The paper was authored by LCSEE alums Kelsey O’Haire and Samuel Price, who both graduated with master’s degrees in May 2022, and Sobhan Soleymani who graduate with his Ph.D. in May 2021. Nasser Nasrabadi, professor in Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, served as the supervisor and editor of the award-winning research paper.  

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