Ryan is the moderator for the iTrends Symposium on Cyber Security held Thursday April 8 at the Qualcomm Institute. The symposium aims to education UCSD students on the opportunities in Cyber Security. The panelist include Dr. Stephen D. Russell, SPAWAR Director of Science & Technology/CTO, Jeff Nichols, Director of Information Technology, Sempra Energy, Paul Martini, Co-founder/CEO, iboss Network Security, and Chad Nelly, Vice President of Operations, ESET North America.

Tortuga Logic, a startup spun out of the Kastner Group, was one of the companies highlighted at the San Diego Venture Group’s ‘Incubators and Accelerators’ event at the Hyatt Regency. This event featured over 300 investors, entrepreneurs, and industry professionals. Tortuga Logic develops technology for creating provably secure systems.

Our paper, which builds a hardware accelerated system for multiple target tracking, was accepted to FCCM 2014. Our system combines multi-core CPU and an FPGA; this allows it to run over 65 times faster than a highly optimized multithreaded implementation running only in software. Congrats to the authors, Matt Jacobsen, Pingfan Meng, Siddarth Sampangi, and Ryan Kastner.

Brina, a Kastner group MS Alumna, was the first female engineer at Instagram. In a recent interview in Elle magazine, she discusses her journey into studying computer science and the challenges of being a minority in a large tech company (Instagram is now a part of Facebook). Brina previously had an op-ed in the Huffington Post providing more specifics on how she became a software engineer.

In his panel talk at the HIMSS workshop “Medical Device Security Risks and Challenges: A Multidisciplinary Response”, Ryan urged the medical device community must start considering hardware in their quest of building reliable and security medical devices. He also called for enhanced collaboration between a bevy of different stakeholders who develop, use, and regulate these devices. A discussion on this (and more) can be found in a interview that he gave to the Healthcare Info Security Group.

Our paper Networks-On-Chip with Provable Security Properties has been accepted for publication in the 2014 Top Picks issue of IEEE Micro. This issue acts as a best paper award for papers submitted to the elite computer architecture papers in 2013. This paper was originally published in ISCA 2013. Congrats to Ryan and Jason as well as our UCSB collaborators, Hassan Wassel, Ying Gao, Tim Sherwood, and Fred Chong as well as Ted Huffmire from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Our paper “Sapper: A Language for Hardware-Level Security Policy Enforcement” was accepted to ASPLOS. Congrats to Jason, Ryan, our collaborators at UCSB (Xun Li, Vineeth Kashyap, Ben Hardekopf, Tim Sherwood, Fred Chong), and UT Austin (Mohit Tiwari).

Jason was one of 31 UCSD students to receive the 2013 ARCS fellowship. The ARCS Foundation, a national non-profit led entirely by women, has been providing financial awards to scholars since 1958, aiming to sustain and enhance research in science, engineering and medicine in the U.S.

Congrats Jason!