Abu Dhabi, November 10, 2013: Faculty members at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have received four new grants — from the National Science Foundation, the US Embassy to the United Arab Emirates, and the NYUAD Research Institute — to pursue pioneering research projects across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and engineering.
“These awards demonstrate stellar achievements by our faculty and we celebrate their successes today. It is telling that these new awards span engineering, social science, the humanities, and arts — a recognition of the breadth of work being done at NYUAD,” said NYUAD Provost Fabio Piano. “These new grants continue to solidify the trajectory of NYUAD as a center of knowledge creation in Abu Dhabi.”
Among these new grants, the National Science Foundation (NSF) — an independent US government agency supporting scientific research — has awarded two research grants to faculty members at NYUAD following a highly competitive, peer-reviewed proposal process in competition with faculty from top institutions in the US and around the world.
Ozgur Sinanoglu, assistant professor of Engineering at NYUAD, alongside Ramesh Karri, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of NYU (NYU-Poly), will use their three-year USD 500,000 grant to further their research in developing improved methods and new techniques to safeguard the security, quality, and design of electronic chip hardware. With the emergence of a decentralized process for chip design and fabrication, the entry of counterfeit and defective chips into the global supply chain is a growing threat that may compromise the quality of the applications they are used in, while leading to potential financial losses and posing a threat to safety and security. With the project “Adapting VLSI Test Principles for VLSI Trust” Sinanoglu, principal investigator of the project, and Karri, co-principal investigator, will aim to improve the reliability and efficacy of techniques, such as logic encryption and split manufacturing, which protect against these threats.
NYUAD Associate Dean of Social Science Hannah Brückner, working in collaboration with Yale University Professor Julia Adams, has also received NSF funding, a two-year grant for USD 70,000 to investigate indications of systematic gender bias in both contributors and content in the reference tool Wikipedia. The project, “Collaborative Research: Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge,” will study mechanisms that potentially influence gender bias in the contributor-based resource, and the prevalence of gender bias across different academic disciplines. The project will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify gender-specific patterns on the representation of scholars and scholarship, ultimately revealing important insights about where gender disparities arise in the process of democratized knowledge.
