Li and Team Win Best Paper Award

March 23, 2026 - Electrical engineering and computer sciences Associate Professor Zhou Li and doctoral student Danyu Sun won a best paper award at the 2026 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium last month in San Diego. They were one of 10 teams recognized.

Their paper addressed a critical challenge in cybersecurity: advanced detection systems can produce false positives, incorrectly flagging benign domains as malicious. Rather than focusing solely on identifying threats, Li’s team introduces a new perspective by incorporating evidence of benign behavior to improve detection reliability.

By leveraging large-scale real-world data and modern AI techniques, including large language models, the system analyzes web-based information to make more informed decisions. “This approach significantly reduces false alarms while maintaining strong detection performance,” said Li.

Overall, their work helps cybersecurity systems to be more accurate, trustworthy and practical in real-world settings, helping reduce alert fatigue and improve user protection. The research is in collaboration with Palo Alto Networks and the system has been deployed in the production environment.

– Lori Brandt