Andrew Clark
Undergraduate Research Projects
Project-based learning is a key aspect of engineering education and is central to WPI's philosophy, as epitomized by WPI's award-winning Major Qualifying Project (MQP) program. I have advised project teams as part of my research group and as Co-Director of the MITRE MQP Center. A summary of some recent projects is as follows.
Smart Home IoT Security Testbed
The Internet of Things promises to revolutionize the way we interact with the physical world, but also creates new vulnerabilities to cyber adversaries. In smart homes and smart buildings, malicious or error-prone apps enable adversaries to access safety-critical systems such as heat and cooling. This project will build a realistic testbed, including hardware devices in the loop interacting with state-of-the-art IoT platforms, to evaluate the effect of cyber attacks on physical properties and design real-time defense mechanisms.
Student: Noelle C. Johnson
Detecting Social Network Bots
Social bots spread misinformation and engage in spam and threatening behavior toward other users. This project, sponsored my MITRE Corporation, will employ statistical methods to detect and identify bots based on activity patterns. The developed bot detection methods will be tested on a large corpus of annotated bot and non-bot traffic.
Student: Sullivan Mulhern
Autonomous Path Planning Under Cyber Attacks
Autonomous vehicles rely on a suite of sensors, including GPS, cameras, inertial measurement units, and Lidar, to understand their surroundings and drive safely. False sensor readings introduced by adversaries or sensor faults have caused accidents, property damage, and loss of life. Students in this project implemented resilient control algorithms for path planning under sensor measurement spoofing attacks on a Turtlebot wheeled mobile robot platform. Outcomes for this project have been used in subsequent publications and outreach activities of our research group. Video: YouTube
Students: Christopher Letherbarrow and Minh Le
Public Demonstration at WPI TouchTomorrow
TouchTomorrow is WPI's annual public outreach event. It is targeted at the local community and is attended by nearly 10,000 people per year. The festival is also an integral part of WPI’s overall STEM pipeline for K-12 students. Our research group has had a demo of our ongoing work on mobile robot path planning and control under cyber attacks.
WPI ECE Freshman Seminar
Starting in 2016, I have delivered annual lectures on Control and Resilience of Complex Networks to a freshman undergraduate seminar in WPI ECE. The goal of the seminar is to inspire undergraduates to pursue careers in engineering and research.
Professional Society STEM Outreach at IEEE CDC and ACC Conferences
I have participated in "The Power, Beauty and Excitement of Cross – Boundaries Nature of Control, a Field that Spans Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM): Workshop for High School Students & Teachers," at the IEEE Control and Decision Conference (CDC) and American Control Conference (ACC) from 2014 to the present. The workshops, organized by Profs. Bozenna Pasik-Duncan and Linda Bushnell, introduce groups of 15-20 high school students and teachers to control theory through applications such as neuroscience, self-driving cars, and synthetic biology. My talk introduces control of complex networks with motivation from social networking, gene regulation, and formation control.
STEM Summer Course with University of Washington Math Academy
During my PhD studies at the University of Washington, I helped to organize summer activities for high school students as part of the University of Washington Math Academy. During this one-week session, 6-8 students learned principles of cryptography and network security before performing lab exercises on a network vulnerability analysis toolkit. I developed and presented the session in collaboration with other PhD students under the supervision of Profs. Linda Bushnell and Radha Poovendran.
