People

Sevval has a background in Computer Sciences and Engineering, and completed her BSc and MSc studies in Sabanci University (Turkey), where she also completed a Mathematics minor program. She completed her Master’s with a thesis focused on secure and privacy preserving identification in IoT network communications, and subsequently joined the BU Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD Program in 2021.

Her current research is Improving Cyber Security Operations using Knowledge Graphs, which is carried on in collaboration with Red Hat. The project explores possibilities to enhance security analysis tools’ accuracy using the vulnerability and weakness data and the trends in National Vulnerability Database (NVD) CVE history, as well as utilizing a knowledge graph representing NVD data to predict upcoming updates to the NVD.

Kevin received his Master’s in Computer Engineering in January 2024, subsequently joining the PhD program in September 2024. His current research focuses on data reconciliation protocols of (blockchain) network and open source library (Gensync) providing a variety of data synchronization protocols. He has contributed to the measurement and development of a novel synchronization protocol (SREP). He is one of the maintainers of Gensync and helped publish software package on various platforms including macports, homebrew and Debian.

Jonah is an undergraduate physics and computer science major graduating in Spring 2026 at Boston University. He is working with the knowledge graph team to optimize embedding models with tuning techniques. This will aid in the predicted associations between new and previous nodes in the knowledge graph.

As an undergraduate research assistant, Anish’s work consists of developing, updating, and testing data reconciliation protocols for GenSync, an open-source data synchronization framework supported by NISLAB. His current focus is on the Bloom Filter Sync and MET-IBLT Sync. The GenSync project aims to provide state-of-the-art protocols in C++ for synchronizing dispersed data at high efficiency with minimum communication and computation cost.

Howell is an undergraduate Computer Engineering major graduating in Spring 2025 at Boston University, with a minor in Mechanical Engineering and a concentration in Machine Learning. He is currently working with the knowledge graph team, where they are embedding threat and vulnerability databases into a knowledge graph data structure with machine learning models. Using the knowledge graph, they can then predict the behavior of associations between database entries, such as the likelihood of new associations being added or previous associations being removed.

Jilin’s current project is investigating the auto-scaling behavior of Kubernetes under adversarial, Economic Denial-of-Service (EDoS) attacks (in particular Yo-yo attacks). Consequently, he has been working with tools such as MicroK8s, Prometheus, Grafana, and JMeter.