lines of code

Trustworthy Computing

Close collaborations with industry and government partners drive Duke ECE’s work to secure systems in the Cloud, on the ground and in the air. Our faculty include internationally recognized specialists in human-machine interaction, whose expertise is regularly sought by policymakers and industry to inform safety considerations for self-driving cars and other autonomous systems, and experts in resilient integrated circuit/system design and software reliability. Among our many research endeavors are machine learning techniques to predict security vulnerabilities, efficient countermeasures that enable embedded systems and microfluidic biochips to detect and resist attacks, and breakthroughs that secure machine learning hardware and AI accelerators. Our faculty lead Air Force University Centers of Excellence on assured autonomy and on communications networks in contested environments.

Miroslave Pajic with students and robot

Research Areas

  • Cybersecurity and hardware security
  • Cyber-physical system analysis and design
  • Edge and fog computing and IoT
  • Ubiquitous computing
  • Reliability, availability, survivability and performance modeling
  • Design-for-testability of 3D integrated circuits and system-on-chip 
  • Human-autonomous system interaction
  • Software aging and rejuvenation
  • Design automation of microfluidic biochip systems

Industry and Government Partners

Good to Know

Krishnendu Chakrabarty

Krishnendu Chakrabarty was appointed as councilor on the DARPA Microsystems Exploratory Council

Yiran Chen

Yiran Chen won the Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award

Highlights

More ECE research news
AR experiment on human brain

Simulated Human Eye Movement Aims to Train Metaverse Platforms

Virtual platform replicates how human eyes track stimuli from conversations to art galleries

A black and white photo of a man with glasses and short hair in front of a blue striped background

Jian Pei: Developing Fair and Transparent Applications for Advances in Data Science

New faculty member Jian Pei connects data science research to real-world applications with an eye on efficiency, fairness and transparency

Primary Faculty

Board

John A. Board

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: High performance scientific computing and simulation, novel computer architectures, cluster computing and parallel processing; ubiquitous computing.

Chen

Tingjun Chen

Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Wireless networking, next-generation wireless and optical networks, edge cloud and computing, Internet-of-Things (IoT), mobile and embedded systems, platforms and testbeds

Chen

Yiran Chen

Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Emerging memory and storage technologies Embedded systems, CPS, edge computing, and mobile applications Neuromorphic computing, deep learning and system security Low power circuit and system

Cummings

Mary "Missy" Cummings

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Human-unmanned vehicle interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-systems engineering, public policy implications of unmanned vehicles, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Gong

Neil Gong

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Security, privacy, and machine learning. 

Gorlatova

Maria Gorlatova

Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Architectures, algorithms, and protocols for emerging mobile pervasive systems and the Internet of Things. Our work crosses traditional discipline boundaries and requires thinking across multiple layers of system and protocol stacks. We are focusing on breaking the barriers for…

Li

Hai "Helen" Li

Clare Boothe Luce Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Neuromorphic computing systems Machine learning acceleration and trustworthy AIEmerging memory technologies, circuit and architecture Low power circuits and systems

Li

Xin Li

Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Integrated circuits, signal processing and data analytics

Pajic

Miroslav Pajic

Dickinson Family Associate Professor

Research Interests: Design and analysis of autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS), and in particular, embedded systems, AI, learning and controls, CPS security and high-assurance autonomy, with various application domains including robotics, automotive, and medical systems

Pei

Jian Pei

Professor of Computer Science

Reiter

Michael Reiter

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor

Research Interests: Prof. Reiter's research interests include all areas of computer and communications security, fault-tolerant distributed computing, and applied cryptography.

Sorin

Daniel J. Sorin

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Computer architecture, designing microarchitectures so that they are easier to verify, improving computer system fault tolerance, developing memory systems for multicore processors, and designing special-purpose accelerators

Trivedi

Kishor S. Trivedi

Hudson Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: Markov models, Fault trees, Stochastic Petri nets, Reliability Modeling, Availability Modeling, Performability modeling, Survivability modeling, Cyber Security, Software reliability, Software Fault Tolerance, Software Aging and Rejuvenation

Wills

Lisa Wills

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests: I enjoy solving difficult problems surrounding computations with the goal to process large volumes of data efficiently. My research interests include computer architecture and microarchitecture, hardware-software co-designs, accelerators, and emerging application domains ―…