Kexiong (Curtis) Zeng

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Ph.D. student
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Virginia Tech

Contact info
Email: kexiong6 AT vt DOT edu

About Me

I received my PhD on Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech under the supervision of Dr. Yaling Yang. In 2017, I was an intern at Facebook Infrastructure, mentored by Dr. Alexey Spiridonov. In 2015, I was a research intern in Cloud & Mobile Group at Microsoft Research, mentored by Drs. Börje Karlsson, Thomas Moscibroda, Ranveer Chandra and Anirudh Badam.

Before that, I got my bachelor's degree with excellent graduate title from Yingcai Honors College at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). During my undergraduate years, I was awarded the National Scholarship (China's highest-class scholarship for the top 1% students) for twice.

I love sports, fashion, and hip hop music, which are all sort of related to street culture. Besides researcher, I am also an amateur basketball player. I was the captain of Virginia Tech Chinese Basketball Team and played in North East Chinese Basketball League (NECBL).

Research Interests

  • I build/secure computer systems and networks, especially for wireless, mobile, embedded, and cyber-physical systems. My projects generally have a hacking flavor with lots of low-level details and manipulations.

  • Keywords: secure localization/navigation, sustainable connectivity.

Professional Activities

  • Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICNC.

Selected Awards

  • Excellent graduate of UESTC, 2013.

  • NSF funded undergraduate intern, 2012-2013.

  • National Scholarship, 2010 and 2012.

News

  • [08/2018] I passed my PhD final defense! What a journey and accomplishment!

  • [07/2018] Our work has been covered by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, ACM TechNews, The Cyberwire podcast, The Register, Naked Security, BleepingComputer, Hackster, Directions Magazine and more.

  • [05/2018] Our paper "All Your GPS Are Belong To Us: Towards Stealthy Manipulation of Road Navigation Systems" got accepted to USENIX Security 2018! Look forward to seeing you in Baltimore!

  • [10/2017] I am joining Facebook in Menlo Park, CA after graduation next year!

  • [04/2017] I am going to do a summer internship at Facebook in Menlo Park, CA! Shoot me an email if you are interested in meeting up.

  • [03/2017] Our paper "Preserving Incumbent Users’ Privacy in Exclusion-Zone-Based Spectrum Access Systems" got accepted to IEEE ICDCS 2017!

  • [12/2016] Our paper "A Practical GPS Location Spoofing Attack in Road Navigation Scenario" got accepted to ACM HotMobile 2017! Look forward to seeing you in Sonoma!

  • [11/2016] Our paper "P2-SAS: Privacy-Preserving Centralized Dynamic Spectrum Access System" got accepted to IEEE JSAC!

  • [06/2016] Our poster "Preserving Incumbent Users' Privacy in Exclusion-Zone-Based Spectrum Access Systems" got accepted to ACM MobiCom 2016! Let's meet up in New York City.

  • [04/2016] Our paper "P2-SAS: Preserving Users' Privacy in Centralized Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems" got accepted to MobiHoc 2016!

  • [03/2016] Our poster “Preserving Incumbent Users’ Privacy in Server-Driven Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems” got accepted to IEEE ICDCS 2016!

  • [01/2016] Check out from MSRA and continue my PhD career at Virginia Tech. Learned a lot from my mentors and colleagues, and enjoyed the 7-month internship time very much. Will definitely miss you guys!

  • [11/2015] Our paper "Incentivizing Spectrum Sensing in Database-Driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing" got accepted to INFOCOM 2016!

  • [11/2015] Give a talk on "Security and Privacy Issues in Internet of Things" at UESTC. Happy to be back!

  • [06/2015] I am currently interning in Mobile and Sensing Systems Group at Microsoft Research Asia and doing research with Drs. Börje Karlsson, Thomas Moscibroda, Ranveer Chandra and Anirudh Badam.

  • [06/2015] Our poster "Privacy-Preserving Server-driven Dynamic Spectrum Access System" got accepted to ACM MobiCom 2015!