ECE Seminar: Wenjing Lou

Abstract
This talk will introduce two novel applications enabled by blockchain and smart contract technologies. The first one is data usage control. Prof. Lou proposes PrivacyGuard, a security platform that combines blockchain smart contract and hardware trusted execution environment (TEE) to enable individual data owner’s fine-grained control over the usage (e.g., which operation, who can use on what condition/price) of their private data. In contrast to data access control, PrivacyGuard is designed to prevent the secondhand misuse of user data, as happened in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The second application she will introduce is a Blockchain-based Decentralized Spectrum Access System (BD-SAS) in the 5G/nextG era. In contrast to the currently deployed centralized SAS, BD-SAS provides SAS service efficiently to spectrum users and enables automated inter-SAS synchronization, without assuming mutual trust among individual SAS administrators.

Bio
Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Endowed Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of the IEEE. She holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research interest focusing on wireless networks, blockchain systems, trustworthy machine learning systems, and security and privacy problems in the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Prof. Lou is a highly cited researcher by the Web of Science Group. She received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2018, the highest university-level faculty research award. She received the INFOCOM Test-of-Time paper award in 2020. She is the TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019 and ACM WiSec 2020. She was the Steering Committee Chair for IEEE CNS conference from 2013 to 2020. She is currently a steering committee member of IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE CNS. She served as a program director at US National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2014 to 2017.