Ajay K Makanahalli Annaiah

Dr. Ajay Kumara M. Annaiah is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). Prior to joining UNCW, he held postdoctoral research positions at Penn State, the University of Arizona, and Florida International University. His research lies at the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, with expertise spanning malware and binary code analysis, vulnerability detection, reverse engineering, obfuscation, virtual machine introspection, and memory forensics. His work places a strong emphasis on AI‑ and large language model (LLM)–driven techniques to address advanced cybersecurity challenges.

At UNCW, he leads the Cyber, Systems, and Software Security Research Lab (CS² Lab), where he mentors a team of student researchers in developing intelligent, automated solutions to complex cyber, systems, and software security problems.
Dr. Kumara has contributed to research projects funded by the DoD, ONR, and NSF and has published in several high-impact journals and conferences. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and actively serves on technical program committees for cybersecurity conferences, as well as a reviewer for IEEE, Springer, and Elsevier journals.
His webpage is available at: https://ajaymas.github.io/

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cybersecurity, National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India.
B.E. and M.Tech in Computer Science, Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka, India.

Specialization in Teaching

Courses I have instructed at UNCW:
CSC 466: Malware analysis
CYBR 358: Cyber Operation
CYBR 424: Security Tools and Engineering

Courses I taught prior to UNCW:
- Computer security
- Ethical hacking
- Software vulnerability analysis
- Operating systems
- Computer architecture
- Principles of programming languages
- Advanced Java programming
- Introduction to Java programming
- Survey of computing
- Ethics in Information technology

Research Interests

Cybersecurity & Privacy
Malware Analysis
Binary Code Analysis
Software Reverse Engineering
Virtual Machine Introspection
Memory Forensics Analysis
Machine Learning & AI for Cybersecurity
Vulnerability Analysis & Fuzzing
LLM for Security

Professional Service

Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2022–present)
Reviewer for International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer (2020–present)
Associate Editorial Board Member for International Journal of Recent Advances in Computer Science and Communications, Bentham Science Publishers (2021–present)
External or sub-reviewer for the International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security
TPC member for the 7th IEEE International Conference on Recent Advances and Innovations in Engineering
TPC member for the 20th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2023)

Honors & Awards

Best Student Research Paper Award at the TAFGEN-2015 Conference, 2015
ACM Travel Grant Award by ACM, India, 2015
Senior Member of IEEE, awarded by IEEE, USA, 2022
Senior Young Professional Award by IEEE, USA, 2022
Named one of Asia’s Top 50 Young Researchers by Education Expo TV