Public Policy Ph.D. Student Wins ‘People’s Choice’ at Cybersecurity Event

Posted April 16, 2018

A team including School of Public Policy graduate student Majid Ahmadi won the People’s Choice Award at the Cybersecurity Demo Day finale on April 12, 2018. The event is sponsored by the Institute for Information Security & Privacy at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The win comes in the first-ever appearance in the annual competition for the School of Public Policy, a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Ahmadi, a Ph.D. student in Public Policy, and Virginia Tech researcher Hanif Rahbari proposed a security dashboard for Internet of Things devices. It was chosen by attendees and those who voted for it online using a Twitter hashtag.

The team won $2,000.

A second School of Public Policy team competing in the event, comprised of graduate students Karim Farhat, Karl Grindal, and Ishan Mehta, did not place.

The top award in the IISP contest went to a team from the School of Computer Science, who proposed a tool to help developers identify potential software licensing violations.

A team from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering won first place in the research track.

The annual contest is designed to help students begin to move their ideas from an academic setting toward commercialization. After submitting an application, teams presented their research at a poster competition in September. Winning entrants received mentoring throughout the year, culminating in the finale.