Intelligent and Sustainable Edge Computing (I-SEC) Lab
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University.
At the Intelligent and Sustainable Edge Computing (I-SEC) Laboratory, led by Dr. Yu Chen, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, we pioneer the next generation of trustworthy and intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Our research is centered around Trust, Security, and Privacy within the Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing paradigm and its applications in creating intelligent, interconnected environments.
A unifying theme of our work is physical grounding for AI trust: before any AI system makes a consequential decision, the data and context feeding it should be verifiable through physics, not statistics alone. Environmental fingerprints — most notably the Electrical Network Frequency (ENF) signal — serve as physically unforgeable anchors that tie digital content and devices to verifiable real-world context.
Currently, we focus on:
- Physically grounded authentication using ENF and multi-physics environmental fingerprints
- Secure-by-design IoT ecosystems atop lightweight blockchain networks and physical-layer oracle authentication
- Detecting, deterring, and mitigating AI-generated content, deepfakes, and digital echo chambers
- Behavioral and multi-dimensional trust verification for decentralized and multi-agent AI systems
- Digital Twins and IoMT-enabled digital healthcare services (DHS)
- Immersive and interconnected 3D edge-fog computing paradigms
Recent Updates
| May 18, 2026 |    Congratulations to Mohsen Hatami, who successfully passed his Ph.D. prospectus exam on May 18, 2026 — which also happened to be his birthday. A memorable day, and one step closer to the Ph.D.! |
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| May 8, 2026 | Dr. Chen delivered the keynote at the 2026 NSF Workshop on Research Data Management in Construction Engineering, hosted by Michigan Technological University. |
| Apr 27, 2026 | Dr. Chen served as an invited panelist on Information Fusion for Health Monitoring at SPIE Defense + Security 2026. |
| Apr 23, 2026 | Dr. Chen has been selected as a recipient of the 2025–26 Watson College Recognition Award for Outstanding Research Achievement, announced at the Spring 2026 Watson College Awards Luncheon. Congratulations! |
| Feb 1, 2026 | The lab has received an NSF ART EXCEED STRP award supporting the CerVaLens project, with Dr. Chen as PI. Congratulations to the team! |
Selected Publications
- ANCHOR-Grid: Authenticating Smart Grid Digital Twins Using Real-World AnchorsSensors 2025
- SAVE: Securing Avatars in Virtual Healthcare Through Environmental Fingerprinting for Elder Safety MonitoringFuture Internet 2025
- Is ENF a Good Physical Fingerprint?In 2026 IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC) 2026
- BRAIN: Blockchain Reputation Architecture for Interest-Flooding Neutralization in Named Data Networking for Internet of ThingsIn 2026 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom) 2026
- CerVaLens: On-Device Multimodal AI-Generated Content Detection for Mobile AuthenticationIn SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2026 2026
- Echo Chamber Index: A GNN-Based Metric for Detecting Echo Chambers in Multi-Agent AI NetworksIn SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2026 2026
- Physically Anchored Trust for MCP-Orchestrated AIoT SwarmsIn 2026 International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION) 2026
- Securing AI Agents in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Survey of Environmental Interactions, Deepfake Threats, and DefensesarXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20184 2026