CSSE Students Earn Research Grants at ICUNJ Symposium

Two Monmouth University students were recently awarded grants from the Independent Colleges and Universities of New Jersey (ICUNJ) Undergraduate Research Symposium held at Bell Works in Holmdel on March 23.

The conference provides a platform for undergraduate students to present research that has been conducted on college campuses across the state in the last year. Presentations are judged by professionals who provide feedback designed to help students improve their work for future interviews or graduate school applications.

Sophia Ramirez Velandia, senior software engineering student, earned a $4,000 grant from Nokia Bell Labs toward her research on quantum machine learning for phishing email detection. Her work will be conducted with a fellow student from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"Our research explores how quantum computing can improve cybersecurity, particularly in detecting phishing and malicious emails," Ramirez Velandia explained. "We are investigating hybrid quantum-classical models that combine quantum kernels with Support Vector Machines (QSVM) to identify harmful email patterns. Using IBM's Qiskit and the QuASK framework, we are building and testing quantum circuits to compare their performance with classical machine learning methods like SVM, XGBoost, and BERT on public phishing datasets."

Zaccery Tarver, senior computer science honors student, earned a $1,000 grant from Schering Plough Undergraduate Research Endeavors (SURE) toward his research on "check-in/checkout" platforms using smart devices.

Tarver said, "Originally, this project was my honors thesis and was completed using an LS2208 Barcode Scanner and JPOS. I will evolve this work by exploring new hardware, near field communication, networking sockets, and database systems."

Ramirez Velandia and Tarver's research abstracts are available in the ICUNJ Undergraduate Research Symposium program.

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