Graduate students make historic firsts for Rowan University

Rowan’s Computer Science graduate students have been making historical firsts for the university within the professional field!

Last summer, Rowan PhD students Skye Waterpeace and Sushanth Ambati had the opportunity to present at the Usenix Security 2025 Conference, the first from Rowan to do so! Located in Seattle, the Usenix Security Conference is a prestigious, A-Tier Cybersecurity conference that unites different cybersecurity professionals to discuss recent advancements about security and privacy of computer systems and networks. The PhD students presented a poster that discussed a new way of making cryptocurrency transactions sustainable.

More recently, PhD students Wajid Manzoor and Chaudhary Muhammed Shaheer Yasir published a paper to ACM SIGMOD 2026, the number one flagship conference in Databases with a 31% acceptance rate. This is the first time a Rowan student has published a paper at a conference recognized by CSRankings, “a metrics-based ranking of top computer science institutions based on faculty publications at selective conferences” (CSRankings). Titled “Bound-Tightened Densest Subgraph Discovery on GPU”, the paper discussed applying parallel programming on the GPU to efficiently solve the Denset Subgraph Discovery (DSD) problem.

In addition to Manzoor and Yasir’s ACM paper, Masters student Attanasia Garuso’s paper, “Vector Quantized Information BottleNeck Mitigation of Adversarial Attacks on Modulation Classifiers”, was recently accepted to the 2026 IEEE conference on Machine Learning for Communication and Networking (IEEE ICMLCN). IEEE ICMLCN is the most important conference held for Machine Learning, bringing together researchers from both Machine Learning and Communication and Networking.

With graduate students from the CS Department making such incredible achievements, we can’t wait to see what the future of Computer Science holds!

Written by Cassandra Marie Nicdao | Posted 03.23.26