Steve Ko

stevkoI am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. I was a visiting professor at KAIST in 2018. I am generally interested in distributed systems, networking, and operating systems. My current research focus is on mobile systems. Before joining UB, I graduated with PhD from UIUC in 2009 under Indranil Gupta and was a postdoc at Princeton for one year under Michael Freedman and Jennifer Rexford. I typically do my research in collaboration with other people, especially with two other faculty members in my department, Karthik Dantu and Lukasz Ziarek.

Contact Information

Office: 113F Davis
Phone: 716-645-4732
Email: stevko (buffalo dot edu, without cse)

Honors

  • Best Paper Award for “FLUID: Flexible User Interface Distribution for Ubiquitous Multi-device Interaction,” ACM MobiCom, 2019
  • Best Paper Award Honorable Mention for “Gesto: Mapping UI Events to Gestures and Voice Commands,” ACM EICS, 2019
  • Qualcomm-KAIST Innovation Award for “Cross-App Function Sharing through X-Droid,” 2018
  • Distinguished Alumni Educator Award, CS Department, UIUC, 2017
  • UB Exceptional Scholar: Teaching Innovation Award, University at Buffalo, 2016
  • Early Career Teacher of the Year Award, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Buffalo, 2015
  • UB Exceptional Scholar: Young Investigator Award, University at Buffalo, 2014
  • CAREER Award, NSF, 2014
  • Community Award Honorable Mention for “Serval: An End-Host Stack for Service- Centric Networking,” NSDI, 2012

Teaching

CSE 486/586 Distributed Systems (Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
CSE 622 Advanced Computer Systems (Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018)
CSE 199 UB Seminar: How the Internet Works (Fall 2017, Fall 2018)
CSE 490/590 Computer Architecture (Spring 2011)
CSE 704 Seminar on Data Center Computing (Fall 2010)

Current Research Projects

Please check out individual project websites:

  • Reptor enables API virtualization on Android.
  • BlueMountain provides a new way to manage mobile data.
  • BlueSeal statically analyzes Android apps to detect security and privacy risks.
  • RTDroid re-designs Android to provide real-time capabilities.

Select Publications

Please refer to NSR’s publications page for all of the publications.

  • Representing String Computations as Graphs for ClassifyingMalware [pdf]
    Justin Del Vecchio, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft), 2020
  • X-Droid: A Quick and Easy Android Prototyping Framework with a Single-App Illusion [pdf]
    Donghwi Kim (KAIST), Soo Young Park (KAIST), Jihoon Ko (KAIST), Steven Y. Ko, Sung-Ju Lee (KAIST)
    Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2019
  • FLUID: Flexible User Interface Distribution for Ubiquitous Multi-device Interaction [pdf]
    Sangeun Oh (KAIST), Ahyeon Kim (KAIST), Sunjae Lee (KAIST), Kilho Lee (KAIST), Dae R. Jeong (KAIST), Steven Y. Ko, Insik Shin (KAIST)
    Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), 2019
  • Mimic: UI Compatibility Testing System for Android Apps [pdf]
    Taeyeon Ki, Chang Min Park, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    Proceedings of the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2019
  • Gesto: Mapping UI Events to Gestures and Voice Commands [pdf]
    Chang Min Park, Taeyeon Ki, Ali J. Ben Ali, Nikhil Sunil Pawar, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, EICS series (PACM-HCI-EICS), 2019
  • Making Android Run on Time [link]
    Yin Yan, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko, Jan Vitek, Lukasz Ziarek
    IEEE Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 2019
  • Android Malware Detection using Complex-Flows [link]
    Feng Shen, Justin Del Vecchio, Aziz Mohaisen, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2018
  • BlueMountain: An Architecture to Customize Data Management on Mobile Systems [pdf]
    Sharath Chandrashekhara, Taeyeon Ki, Kyungho Jeon, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko
    Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), 2017
  • Reptor: Enabling API Virtualization on Android for Platform Openness [pdf]
    Taeyeon Ki, Alexander Simeonov, Bhavika Pravin Jain, Chang Min Park, Keshav Sharma, Karthik Dantu, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), 2017
  • RTDroid: A Design for Real-Time Android [link]
    Yin Yan, Shaun Cosgrove, Varun Anand, Amit Kulkarni, Sree Harsha Konduri, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), Volume 15, Issue 10, October, 2016
  • Information Flows as a Permission Mechanism [pdf]
    Feng Shen, Namita Vishnubhotla, Chirag Todarka, Mohit Arora, Babu Dhandapani, Eric John Lehner, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    Proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2014
  • Real-Time Android with RTDroid [pdf]
    Yin Yan, Shaun Cosgrove, Varun Anand, Amit Kulkarni, Sree Harsha Konduri, Steven Y. Ko, Lukasz Ziarek
    Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), 2014
  • Serval: An End-Host Stack for Service-Centric Networking [pdf]
    Erik Nordstrom, David Shue, Prem Gopalan, Rob Kiefer, Matvey Arye, Steven Y. Ko, Jennifer Rexford, Michael J. Freedman
    Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2012

Professional Activities