Cyrus Karsan

Ransomware Detection in VMs

Created two prong ML and heuristic system to detect ransomware in hypervisors

Used a decision tree ML model to predict malicious network traffic with 94% accuracy
Calcuated shanon entropy of disk data per VM with high entropy indicating an attack

Used a dynamic sliding window to correlate signals from ML model and entropy heuristic

Fairness in AI, ML model

Sought to determine if AI is fair in its analysis of census data.
Hypthesized that the popular census adult dataset underpresented women and minorites.
Using Google's tensorflow API, we trained a model to test our hypothesis.
Using accuracy and error as metrics, we learned that this dataset, which is supposed to represent the world population, consists of mostly white men which caused it to predict that minorities will make less than <50k a year over 80% of the time.

Sustainable Autonomy Research Project, Founder

Fall of 2019, UCSC began trashing all of its recycling due to high levels of contamination.
Noticed the need for a solution which did not require human intervention when sorting trash.
Applied and were awarded a resaech grant to tackle this issue.
Using AWS rekognition, created a robot which is able to distinguish between trash, recycling, and compost.
Minimum viable product in the works.

Distributed Key Value Store REST API

Created a user specified number of replicas using docker containers
Data was sharded equally across replicas
- Developed dynamic resharding mechanism to ensure all shards are distributed equally across at least two replicas
Used vector clocks to ensure casual consitancy

Multithreaded HTTP server with logging

Created a Multi-threaded HTTP server in C capable of handling thousands of requests concurrently.
Used semaphores to log all requests to a single file, concurrently, without overriding previous entries increasing throughput of entries substantially.
Utilized C socket programming and the pthread library to implement multithreading.

Voice Activated Waste Sorter

Created a voice activated waste sorter
Used Google cloud speech API to parse voice commands
Compared item to our database hosted in Azure and sorted item accordingly
Arduino motor would open the correct bin and close the incorrect one depending on query result
Used arduino sensor to determine when bin is full and used notivize API to send a text message to the owner

Ethereum Mining Rig

Before the Bitcoin boom, I learned about blockchain technologies and saw its potential to disrupt industries. In an attempt to support the network and mine coins, I built a ETHash miner using off the shelf hardware. Booted linux onto the miner and used SSH commands to run the scripts. Here's a gallery of some old photos of the machine.