Mehdi Mirakhorli - Featured Faculty 2017

His research spans software architecture design, software security, privacy, and safety. Dr. Mirakhorli’s research is mainly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He is the recipient of two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards and one Best Paper Award. Furthermore, Dr. Mirakhorli has been a speaker in several technical venues such as ALTA Distinguished Speaker at Alcatel-Lucent, government-sponsored technical briefings on issues related to software security and safety as well as various academic venues.

His laboratory includes a diverse body of undergraduate, and graduate students working on the development of novel scientific techniques as well as tools to enhance software quality attributes such security, privacy, and safety.

On a current project sponsored by the US Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Mirakhorli is developing new approaches to identify architectural vulnerabilities that can open backdoors into applications. This works enhances the state of the art and practice in the area of software security as it takes an architecture-first approach to software security. Current tools and techniques have a low-level source code based approach. However, it is difficult to achieve a high level of any system quality by focusing solely on coding. Architectural vulnerabilities can overwhelm even the most heroic coding efforts, and ignoring such issues will result in a backdoor for attackers to get access to sensitive information. Dr. Mirakhorli’s work in this area is a recipient of a Best Paper Award.

In another recent project, Dr. Mirakhorli’s team are collaborating with medical device industry on a Medical Device Development Tool Kit that uses artificial intelligence, data mining, and information retrieval techniques help the manufacturer demonstrate that the device is in compliance with FDA regulations, is free from risks that can lead to physical hazards. Before a medical device can be used in the clinical environment, the manufacturer must demonstrate that the device provides a medical benefit in routine clinical use, and also the device is hazard free. Demonstrating that a device is safe, and reliable systems is difficult. Certification and regulatory agencies routinely require full life-cycle traceability for the demonstration of fitness. Dr. Mirakhorli’s work in this area is the recipient of ACM SIGSOFT Best Paper Award.

In another NSF funded project, Dr. Mirakhorli is collaborating with Dr. Nenad Medvidovic, professor of computer science, from the University of Southern California, Dr. Sam Malek, associate professor of computer science, from the University of California at Irvine, and Dr. Josh Garcia, Associate Scientist, from University of California at Irvine. In this project, this team of researchers is developing a Community-Wide Software Architecture Instrument (SAIN). The goal of SAIN is to enable innovative research in the domain of software engineering.

Dr. Mehdi Mirakhorli
Assistant Professor
RIT Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences