Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation

USC Viterbi Magazine Spotlights SPHERE Principal Investigator Jelena Mirkovic

We’re proud to announce that our PI, Dr. Jelena Mirkovic, is featured as one of 23 visionary researchers in the Fall 2024 USC Viterbi Magazine! She’s highlighted among USC’s leading innovators who are reimagining computing through a human-centered lens.

“For the last decade, Jelena Mirkovic, USC Viterbi research associate professor of computer science, has studied the memorability and security of passwords, and the ways in which these two are often at odds. Mirkovic likes five-to-seven-word passwords or phrases — she is fond of writing poetry — often mixing languages like English and her native Serbian.”

As our project leader at SPHERE (Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation), Dr. Mirkovic guides our mission to transform cybersecurity and privacy research. Under her direction, we’re building infrastructure that empowers researchers to conduct sophisticated, reproducible experiments and build upon each other’s work.

Beyond leading SPHERE, Dr. Mirkovic brings extensive expertise to USC/ISI as a Principal Scientist and to USC’s School of Advanced Computing as a research associate professor. Her groundbreaking research spans denial-of-service attacks, vulnerability scanning, and user-centric security and privacy.

We’re incredibly fortunate to have such an inspiring leader guiding SPHERE’s vision for the future of cybersecurity research!