Dr. Jeffrey Blessing, professor, Rader School of Business, was one of 30 competitors who won Round 2 of the competition, launched by Foxconn. The competition incentivizes the development of new technologies aimed at developing smart and connected cities. Blessing has proposed a way to create cyber-secure smart cities by using AI technologies to develop, prototype and build cybersecurity devices, processors and networks that are immune to malware.   

“Essentially, it’s an Internet of Things (IoT) device that uses deep learning to learn the communication behavior of malware in order to identify and defeat it,” said Blessing. “The resulting product could be realized in hardware (a physical device, or embedded device in a router) or software (a security module).”   

“There are established companies that sell network security equipment. However, none of them sell intelligent devices that use machine learning as I’ve proposed,” Blessing continued. “Now is an opportune time to bring established machine learning techniques from the world of artificial intelligence into cybersecurity.”  

Blessing now advances to Round 3 of the competition, where he is a finalist competing for one of 16 Presidents Awards.