Some updates for the start of the year

It’s been about a year since I arrived at ODU! In that time, I’ve been fortunate to work with brilliant colleagues and great students. I’ve started my lab, submitted papers and grants, continued to improve my courses, and settled into ODU. As my research and lab continue to grow, I have some new paper acceptances to announce:

• “PPIMCE: An In-Memory Computing Fabric for Privacy Preserving Computing”. Haoran Geng, Jianqiao Mo, Dayane Reis, Jonathan Takeshita, Taeho Jung, Brandon Reagen, Michael Niemier, Xiaobo Sharon Hu. Journal of Computer Science and Technology (2025).
• “Encrypted Post Deployment Calibration on MNIST with CKKS and Chebyshev Polynomials”. Shadman Mahmood Khan Pathan, Qianlong Wang, Jonathan Takeshita, Sakan Binte Imran, Sachin Shetty. IEEE ICNC 2026.

Besides these immediate results, my first year as a professor of computer science has given me a bit to think about with regard to New Year’s resolutions (besides “write more”), as part of my job is now to consider how computers affect us. The first of these is that I want to get back to reading more books. Happily, the ODU Libraries give excellent borrowing privileges to faculty, and I am looking forward to abusing using them to read much more this next year. Good writing comes from lots of long-form reading, which is constantly eroded by the shorter text and smaller units of engagement in modern social media. Besides reading more myself, I’m also going to encourage my students to read long-form books and articles. The second of these comes from the difficult realization that I am a bit of an anachronism; the world has passed me by. Students using AI haven’t invented academic dishonesty¹, but AI has certainly removed a lot (basically all) of the cost and difficulty required for completely effortless generation of deliverables earning a passing grade, which makes ensuring academic integrity much more challenging than it was when I was a student. In my course, I previously used a policy from (some) Michigan EECS courses of academic honesty penalties of one-third of a letter grade, which was a policy that I think worked well in 2016. A decade later, my experience is outdated: because of the ease of using AI, this is no longer enough of a deterrent. Further, because of the ability of AI to produce human-like writing, a single incident calls all of a student’s work in a course into question. Due to this, starting this semester any cheating in my courses will now be an automatic F. More generally, my second resolution is to double down on enforcing academic integrity, to defend the value of the degrees earned by honest students with their own efforts. My third resolution is to read more in Japanese. I can’t quite get to actual books yet, but easy-JP news articles are getting to be within my grasp. Apple’s in-browser EN/JP dictionary does make this a bit easier, which is a nice reminder that even with many recent prominent failures of technology, most of it does make our lives better!

I’m looking forward to another year of excellence and learning with the APES lab, CS 463, and my colleagues at the School of Cybersecurity, Department of Computer Science, and across ODU!