Ajay K Makanahalli Annaiah

Ajay Kumara is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, starting in Fall 2024. He previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lenoir-Rhyne University and held postdoctoral positions at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona, and Florida International University.

Dr. Kumara's research focuses on cybersecurity areas such as malware analysis, binary code analysis, reverse engineering, fuzzing, virtual machine introspection, memory forensics, virtualization, and cloud computing. By leveraging AI-enhanced static and dynamic analysis, he aims to detect unknown malware and identify vulnerabilities in binary code. He has contributed to projects funded by the DoD, ONR, and NSF and has published in high-impact journals and conferences. As a senior IEEE member, he also serves on technical program committees for cybersecurity conferences and as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security and various Springer journals.
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
CSC 358: Cyber Operation
CSC 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

Malware analysis and binary code analysis
Software reverse engineering, obfuscation, and deobfuscation
Virtual machine introspection and memory forensics
Vulnerability Analysis & Fuzzing
Security in cloud computing and virtualization
Artificial intelligence for cybersecurity

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