[ Education | Biography | CV | Publications | Technical Reports | Manuscripts | Teaching ]

+-----------+
| Education |
+-----------+

> Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 2008-current
> M.Sc. Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 2008
> B.Sc. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 2006

+-----------+
| Biography |
+-----------+

I am a fifth year PhD student in the Comptuer Science Department at UCLA. My Adviser is Dr. Peter Reiher and I am a member of Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research. I received my Masters from University of California, Berkeley where I worked on the StatNews project and my adviser was Dr. Laurent El Ghaoui. I received my BSc also from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science while I was involved in research at The Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the STEREO mission.

My focus of PhD is network security while I am generally interested in computer secruity, computer networks, applied machine learning, applied cryptography, and computer science education. Currently, as my primary research project, I work on end-to-end measurements of network performance for security purposes. I am also currently working on a project to secure mobile medical devices, supervised by Dr. Reiher and Dr. Sarrafzadeh. Prior to these projects, I worked on controlling applications by managing network characteristics under Dr. Kleinrock and Dr. Reiher's supervision. I am also part of the computer science education research aiming to improve the cybersecurity awareness by teaching the security mindset in non-security computer science courses.

I have been working at Symantec, Inc. on reputation-based security since June 2010. Previously, I worked at PostPath which was later acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc.

+--------------+
| Publications |
+--------------+

> Teaching the Security Mindset to CS 1 Students Vahab Pournaghshband SIGCSE 2013 [PDF] [Slides] [BibTex]
> Securing Legacy Mobile Medical Devices Vahab Pournaghshband, Majid Sarrafzadeh, and Peter Reiher MobiHealth 2012 [PDF] [Slides]
> Controlling Applications by Managing Network Characteristics Vahab Pournaghshband, Leonard Kleinrock, Peter Reiher, and Alexander Afanasyev ICC 2012 [PDF] [BibTex]
> A Robust Trust Model for Named-Data Networks Vahab Pournaghshband and Karthikeyan Natarajan SAM 2011 [PDF]
> A New Watermarking Approach for Relational Data Vahab Pournaghshband ACM-SE 2008 [PDF]
> An Optimal Query Execution plan for Database Systems Vahab Pournaghshband and Shahriar Movafaghi IRMA 2007 [PDF]

In Progress:

> End-to-End Detection of Compression of Traffic Flows
> An HMM-based Farsi Optical Character Recognition

+-------------------+
| Technical Reports |
+-------------------+

> Statistical Analysis of Online News Vahab Pournaghshband Master Thesis 2007 [PDF]
> A Robust Skeletonizer for Farsi Image-texts Vahab Pournaghshband 2007 [PDF]
> Determination of the 3D Trajectory and Velocity of Coronal Mass Ejections using Stereoscopy Vahab Pournaghshband and Paulett Liewer 2006 [PDF] [Slides]

+-------------+
| Manuscripts |
+-------------+

> Notes on Transport Layer Security (2009)
> Advances in Self-Policing Cloud Computing (2009)
> What Are Botnets and How to Hijack Them? (2009)
> Short Tutorial on Signals in Linux (2008)
> Privacy Concerns (2007)

+----------+
| Teaching |
+----------+

> Winter 2014: [CS111] Operating Systems Principles (Online) UCLA
> Fall-- 2013: [CS31-] Introduction to Computer Science I UCLA
> Summer 2013: [CS31-] Introduction to Computer Science I UCLA [evaluation]
> Summer 2013: [CS111] Operating Systems Principles UCLA [evaluation]
> Spring 2011: [CS31-] Introduction to Computer Science I UCLA [evaluation]
> Winter 2011: [CS111] Operating Systems Principles UCLA
> Fall-- 2010: [CS31-] Introduction to Computer Science I UCLA [evaluation]
> Spring 2010: [CS31-] Introduction to Computer Science I UCLA [evaluation]
> Winter 2010: [CS32-] Introduction to Computer Science II UCLA [evaluation]
> Fall-- 2009: [CS31-] Introduction to Computer Science I UCLA
> Spring 2008: [CS3--] Introduction to Symbolic Programming UC Berkeley [evaluation]
> Fall-- 2007: [CS70-] Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science UC Berkeley [evaluation] [discussion notes]
> Spring 2007: [CS70-] Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science UC Berkeley [evaluation] [discussion notes]

+---------------+
| Miscellaneous |
+---------------+

> List of honors and awards
> KelK Software
> Travelling
> Sports