Rate My Professor Liang Zhao

Liang Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology in the College of Computing and Software Engineering at Kennesaw State University, where he serves as a SunTrust Faculty Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia State University and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University. Before joining KSU, Dr. Zhao worked as a research data scientist at IBM. His research spans cybersecurity, big data computing and analytics, and machine learning, with a focus on efficient and secure computing frameworks for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things. Ongoing projects include federated learning for detecting false data injection attacks in solar farms, communication-efficient semi-hierarchical federated analytics in IoT networks, vibration sensing-based human and infrastructure safety and health monitoring, hybrid decentralized data analytics in edge computing empowered IoT networks, and privacy-preserving distributed analytics in fog-enabled IoT systems. In 2024, he received a $51,747 NIH AIM-AHEAD grant to investigate health factors related to obesity using AI and machine learning, analyzing social determinants of health from large datasets like the OCHIN database covering over six million patients to build predictive models for rural communities.