Steven Ko Receives NSF CAREER Award

Steven Ko, Assistant Professor and member of the Networked Systems Research Group, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received a 2014 NSF CAREER award for his proposal, “Systems for Transparency in Personal Devices and Services.”

Ko aims to answer the many “why” questions we ask about our smartphones, tablets and social network services, such as “why am I seeing this online ad?”, "is my application sending my contact information to somewhere else?", or “why is my device not lasting even a day?”

His goal is to make these personal devices and services transparent so that they reveal their inner- workings, which would enable us to inspect and understand why they are doing what they are doing. Once we understand this, then we can either adjust our behavior or think about ways to rectify it.

Ko joined UB  in 2010. His research interests include distributed systems, networking, and operating systems. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and was a postdoc at Princeton University for a year prior to joining UB.

The prestigious NSF CAREER Award provides five years of funding for researchers. They are designed to support junior faculty who have shown exceptional promise in teaching and research.