Baishakhi Ray Receives 2019 IBM Faculty Award

IBM has selected assistant professor Baishakhi Ray for an IBM Faculty Award. The highly selective award is given to professors in leading universities worldwide to foster collaboration with IBM researchers. Ray will use the funds to continue research on artificial intelligence-driven program analysis to understand software robustness. 

Although much research has been done, there are still countless vulnerabilities that make system robustness brittle. Hidden vulnerabilities are discovered all the time – either through a system hack or monitoring system’s functionalities. Ray is working to automatically detect system weaknesses using artificial intelligence (AI) with her project, “Improving code representation for enhanced deep learning to detect and remediate security vulnerabilities”.

One of the major challenges in AI-based security vulnerability detection is finding the best source code representation that can distinguish between vulnerable versus benign code. Such representation can further be used as an input in supervised learning settings for automatic vulnerability detection and fixes. Ray is tackling this problem by building new machine-learning models for source code and applying machine learning techniques such as code embeddings. This approach could open new ways of encoding source code into feature vectors. 

“It will provide new ways to make systems secure,” said Ray, who joined the department in 2018. “The goal is to reduce the hours of manual effort spent in automatically detecting vulnerabilities and fixing them.”

A successful outcome of this project will produce a new technique to encode source code with associated trained models that will be able to detect and remediate a software vulnerability with increased accuracy.

IBM researchers Jim Laredo and Alessandro Morari will collaborate closely with Ray and her team on opportunities around design, implementation, and evaluation of this research.