In the annual National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship competition Adam Champion received the Honorable Mention designation. This is a highly popular and selective award annually giving out just under 500 awards from approximately 10,000 applicants. Mr. Champion's application, Proposed Plan of Research: Malware Detection, offered "to research improving the automated detection ability of data mining computer programs in distinguishing benign from malicious programs." This would have been an expansion of his work with Dr. Dong Xuan's group the summary of which can be read in his article "Detecting Worms via Mining Dynamic Program Execution" as published in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2007). As a reward for his efforts, he will, courtesy of the NSF, have access to the TeraGrid supercomputer and other resources on the nation's cyberinfrastructure.
Mr. Champion has just completed his first year of the graduate program working with Dr. Dong Xuan. His research interests are in computer and network security, particularly wired Internet security. Adam received his Bachelors of Science degree from OSU in 2007 and is from Columbus, Ohio.
The National Science Foundation gives the Graduate Research Fellowships in an effort to ensure the "to ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the United States and to reinforce its diversity."