Aron Laszka is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, a Research Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research interests revolve around artificial intelligence and cyber-physical systems, focusing on machine learning for decision making and optimization, with applications in smart and connected communities, critical infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications can have significant vulnerabilities, which may be exploited by adversaries to cause considerable harm. An important approach for …
Public transit agencies are focused on making their fixed-line bus systems more energy efficient by introducing electric (EV) and hybrid (HV) vehicles to their fleets. However, …
For first responders entering into a post-disaster situation, there is usually a severe lack of up-to-date ground truth. The initial period of time has multiple sources of …
Food insecurity is the lack of consistent and reliable access to nutritious food. In the Houston (Texas) area, over 14% of Harris County households experienced food insecurity before the emergence of COVID-19. It is unclear how the nutritional needs of Houston’s vulnerable populations will be served when the next devastating weather event strikes the region, given that the city is already experiencing multiple disasters, including COVID-19, economic disruptions, and systemic food insecurity. The Houston Food Bank (HFB) collaborates with over 1,500 partners to address the needs of families experiencing food insecurity. Through a community-driven approach, this project brings together civic collaborators with university researchers to align HFB’s food distribution strategy to match food insecurity during multiple disaster profiles. Our project will develop indicators of individual and community equity for food distribution during pandemics and extreme weather events; design a network organizational resilience index for food bank networks and interventions to improve network resilience; develop and validate a predictive tool for infrastructure vulnerability, and develop and validate an artificial-intelligence based decision-making tool for determining the locations of food distribution hubs and their food allocation.
Public-transit systems face a number of operational challenges: (a) changing ridership patterns requiring optimization of fixed line services, (b) optimizing vehicle-to-trip …
This Houston-based project establishes a collaborative process with community and commercial technology partners to accelerate the equitable development of accessible fast charging infrastructure and electric vehicle (EV) ownership for low income families by leveraging regional markets of early EV adopters. The novelty of the project lies in a community-driven participatory approach that integrates both social and technical dimensions, bringing transformational change to EV ownership and electrification of smart public transportation. This will be achieved using a data-driven model that integrates real-time data from micro-transit, fixed-route transit, and carpooling services to predict and overcome the uncertainties of traffic conditions, which would result in uncertain travel times and poor reliability.
Modern intelligent urban mobility applications are underpinned by large-scale, multivariate, spatiotemporal data streams. Working with this data presents unique challenges of data …
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker’s share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further …
Electric vehicles (EVs) are critical to the transition to a low-carbon transportation system. The successful adoption of EVs heavily depends on energy consumption models that can …
Affordable public transit services are crucial for communities since they enable residents to access employment, education, and other services. Unfortunately, transit services that …
