Research spotlight on...Wei Yu
University System of Maryland (USM) Wilson H. Elkins Professorship awardee, TU associate professor helps defend U.S. infrastructure from cyber attacks
By Megan Bradshaw on January 13, 2017
Cyber attacks aren’t limited to stealing government secrets or identity theft. What would happen if hackers gained access to the critical infrastructure systems that control traffic, energy and other critical public resources?
Towson University Fisher College of Science and Mathematics associate professor Wei Yu is in the middle of a prestigious five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) award in September 2014 for a project designed not only to advance scientific understanding of the impacts of cyber-attacks on smart grid operation and end users, but to help communities develop security countermeasures.
The U.S. Department of Energy defines smart grid as “a modernized electrical grid that uses analog or digital information and communications technology to gather and act on information, such as information about the behaviors of suppliers and consumers, in an automated fashion to improve the efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of the production and distribution of electricity.”
It is a complex system that faces diverse threats raised from natural disasters, habits of energy use as well as malicious attacks. Yu’s project will make an impact on the national economy, provide a scientific foundation for designing a secured and efficient energy-based critical infrastructure, and inform higher education curriculum on advanced networking, network security and smart grid security.
Yu and his team of researchers are developing a modeling framework for secured and efficient energy resource management to quantify uncertainties from both the cyber and physical power grids. They are creating a variety of techniques to manage energy resources efficiently and a simulation tool to test their framework and techniques.
The team has published several articles, including a chapter in a book titled “Smart Grid Networking, Data Management, and Business Models.” Yu received the 2016 University System of Maryland (USM) Wilson H. Elkins professorship in July, a 2015 USM Regents faculty award for excellence, and best paper awards from IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).