Assistant Professor
Computer Science
Office
Applied Innovation Hub
413 - 07
Or by appointment
Biography
Dr. Vijayakanthan holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology (Computer Science Track) from Towson University in Maryland; an M.S. in Information Technology from Montclair State University in New Jersey; and a Bachelor of Engineering from Anna University in Chennai, India. Prior to joining Central, she was an adjunct instructor at Montclair State and Towson Universities, where she was also a research assistant; an Analyst Programmer at Allstate Insurance; and Business Analyst at New York City Transit. Her doctoral research, funded by the National Security Agency (NSA), explored the transformative potential of AI within the Internet of Things (IoT). She led a team in developing various IoT testbeds and pioneered a novel memory-based fingerprinting technique that encodes dynamic memory signals into audio spectrums to detect anomalies in IoT systems. She extended this work at Louisiana State University (LSU) and collaborated with Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) to implement and validate the effectiveness of this technique in Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), streamlining triaging and digital forensic analysis for incident response teams.
Education
Areas of Expertise
AI/ML, LLMs, GenAI, Deep Learning Models, IoT Malware Analysis, Memory Fingerprinting, Digital Forensics and security, Privacy in Mobile/IOT Devices, and Software Reverse Engineering
Publications, Research & Presentations
- Vijayakanthan, Ramyapandian, Karley M. Waguespack, Irfan Ahmed, and Aisha Ali-Gombe. "Fortifying IoT Devices: AI-Driven Intrusion Detection via Memory-Encoded Audio Signals." In 2023 IEEE Secure Development Conference (SecDev), pp. 106-117. IEEE Computer Society, 2023.
- Ramyapandian Vijayakanthan, Irfan Ahmed, and Aisha Ali-Gombe. 2022. Transforming Memory Image to Sound Wave Signals for an Effective IoT Fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 352–354. https://doi.org/10.1145/3508398.3519366
- Vijayakanthan, Ramyapandian, Irfan Ahmed, and Aisha Ali-Gombe. "SWMAT: Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients-based memory fingerprinting for IoT devices." Computers & Security 132 (2023): 103298.
- Ali-Gombe, Aisha, Sneha Sudhakaran, Ramyapandian Vijayakanthan, and Golden G. Richard III. "cRGB_Mem: At the intersection of memory forensics and machine learning." Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation 45 (2023): 301564.
- Waguespack, Karley M., Kaitlyn J. Smith, Olame A. Muliri, Ramyapandian Vijayakanthan, and Aisha Ali-Gombe. "MARS: The first line of defense for IoT incident response." Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation 49 (2024): 301754.
Awards & Grants
- UPE (Upsilon Pi Epsilon) - Honor for academic excellence in the computing and information disciplines, Towson University
Apr 2022 - AEL (Alpha Epsilon Lambda) - Honor for academic achievements, Montclair State University
Apr 2018