Duminda Wijesekera is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia and a visiting research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He leads the Laboratory of Radio and RADAR Engineering (RARE), a collaboration between academia, industry and government located at GMU. His current research addresses multiple areas. The first is the security and safety of cyber physical systems. Research in this area includes safety and security of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that includes trains, aircraft, ships and automobiles and creating secure cognitive radio networks that ensure mandated safety guarantees for these transportation modes. He also collaborates on systems and communication security of power grids. A second area of his emerging research is connected autonomous vehicles. In this area, he works with his graduate students in developing models and protocols to disseminate stability related information in real time to enable corporate safety and message deliver, processing and integrity validation. This also links with multi-modal transport systems with application to seamless parking and pickup services by small -scale autonomous fleets. In addition, he is leading research work in adversarial activity detection in Deep Learning systems as most sensor systems used in autonomous vehicles depend on sensory inputs from cameras, Thermal Images, RADARS, LiDAR and Sonar devices. These devices use learning systems for obstacle detection and road scenery understanding. Another area of research is his work in digital forensics, where he leads his graduate students in creating potential scenarios from evidence and creating frameworks for argumentations, error management of forensic data and add odds ratio between different scenarios that fit evidence. He is a visiting research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a fellow at the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies in Arlington, VA. He holds courtesy appointments as and a member of the Center for Command, Control and Coordination (C4I) and as a co-director of the Center for Assurance Research (CARE) at George Mason University.
