By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 1 Dec: In yet another achievement, a Doon University faculty has received the SERB Mobility Award from the Government of India. Dr Preeti Mishra, Assistant Professor, School of Technology, Doon University, has been awarded the prestigious Power–Mobility Grant by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Union Ministry of Science and Technology, for the year, 2023-2024.
Doon University Vice Chancellor Professor Surekha Dangwal said that Dr Mishra is an emerging female research scientist in the field of cloud computing and security. The SERB Power Mobility Fellowship is a prestigious award. It is given to a selected and limited number of outstanding scholars for their exceptional contributions in the field of research. This grant has been given to less than 20 candidates across the country in November 2023.
To receive this award, Dr Preeti Mishra was in competition with faculty members from various national level IIT institutions, Central Universities, IISc Bangalore and NIT institutions. Dr Preeti is the first and only woman educationist of Uttarakhand to receive this grant and award. With the help of this grant, she will go to the University of Padua, Italy, to pursue her collaborative research with Professor Mauro Conti, a renowned cyber security expert on “Interpretable Machine Learning Based Malware Detection Models to Identify Adversarial Examples in Virtualisation Environments”.
Professor Mauro is a renowned researcher in this area of cyber security. He is a Full Professor at UNIPD, Italy. He heads the SPRITZ Security and Privacy Research Group as well as being a Marie Curie Fellow in the European Union (2012), and a Marie Curie Alumni Fellow (2016).
Professor Dangwal said that the students of Doon University will benefit from the international exposure that faculty member Dr Preeti Mishra will get.
Dr Preeti Mishra developed various introspection based security solutions for Cloud during her PhD at Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur. She has also worked as a visiting scholar at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, under Professor Vijay Varadarajan in 2015, for which she was awarded a fellowship. She has also received funding (research grant) from Data Security Council of India (DSCI) for sponsored research in the year 2023. Dr Mishra was awarded a research grant worth more than Rs 20 lakhs by SERB-DST, Government of India, in the field of Cloud Security in 2022. She has written a textbook with Taylor and Francis, CRC Press, titled ‘Cloud Security: Attacks, Tools, Techniques, and Challenges’, published in December 2021. She is also the mentor of an advanced cyber security research laboratory at Doon University.
Dr Mishra is involved in conducting cutting-edge research in the field of cyber security. Her high-quality research has been published in high impact factor journals of international reputation such as IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Communication Survey and Tutorials, etc.
She explained that virtualisation is the foundation of many technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, and there has been a significant market surge in this area in recent times. There is an urgent need to provide an effective security solution to protect against sophisticated cyber attacks on critical virtual infrastructures. Machine learning is one of the techniques that is widely used for malware detection/analysis. However, even machine learning models are not free from attackers. Adversarial machine learning is the study of bypassing machine learning models to protect such AI models from attacks.
Dr Preeti aims to investigate and analyse in detail the groundbreaking advances in Adversarial Machine Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence to develop reliable and robust security solutions in virtualised environments. This research will provide new dimensions to the development of robust AI based security technologies in India.
