The world belongs to those who dare to think outside the box and question the old ways — experimenting and improvising, envisioning novel approaches, and proposing new ways of doing things.

This approach to work and life is something James Chang-Davidson embodies. The fifth-year computer science major is also an avid maker, a person who experiments and tweaks with do-it-yourself culture with the goal of inventing new methods and solutions.

“A maker is all about the mindset, looking at the world and thinking about how you can improve it,” Chang-Davidson explains. “It is about looking at something broken, not accepting it at face value, and saying ‘Hey, I can fix it by tweaking it a little.”

That said, making is not exclusive to hardware or to a particular field of study. Instead, it transcends boundaries, and allows practitioners to unearth creative solutions and expand their horizons.

“Hardware creativity requires a lot of software, but I am also interested in looking at software development as a creative process,” Chang-Davidson says, adding that “Khoury students are not bound to work only on software-related things. There is a huge element of value in branching out into hardware and into fabrics, leather work, or glass work.”

To that end, Chang-Davidson recently returned from Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, where he served as an orientation ambassador and assisted the administration with activities designed to acclimatize students to their new surroundings. He also helped put together a maker panel discussion for the new students during orientation week, where local makers Sudhu Tewari and Eve Scarborough joined Chang-Davidson in discussing their varied maker experiences, struggles, and learning over the years.

Apart from the on-campus event, Chang-Davidson went a mile further to ensure the new students could explore their interests. He did so by leveraging his own experiences, namely his stint as president and product manager of Northeastern Electric Racing.

READ: Northeastern Electric Racing shows out at NASCAR’s famed “Magic Mile”

“We also organized a partnership with a local industrial art school in Oakland, called the Crucible, which is actually where I first learned to weld,” he says. “We organized some trips to the Crucible where students got to participate in a wide variety of different workshops. In particular, I got to join a group of students building little leather wallets.”

Apart from the value of making, Chang-Davidson highlights the importance of consistent and effective inter-campus coordination for student experiences.

“There is a huge amount of value in building cross-campus collaborations and realizing the true potential of Northeastern as a global university,” he says. “It’s about giving these campuses a sense of community in a broader university ecosystem.”

Chang-Davidson aims to leave behind a positive impact on his fellow students, setting a precedent others can benefit from.

“This year is my final year at Northeastern, and I am hopeful that I will be able to build a lot of impactful programming with students at all of the campuses,” he says. “I am building collaborations with London students too; we’re planning more maker programming that will tie everything together across all campuses.”

In today’s fast-paced world, high-speed internet and mobile service have become far more of a necessity than a luxury. But as evolving and maturing data services demand higher internet speeds, and as operating systems beg protection, hackers and hostiles continue to interfere. For some, this involves hacking home and office wireless connections with the aim of extracting personal or business data.

But whether their targets are government-run institutions, private companies, or individual users, these attackers often employ high-powered signal jamming apparatuses — wireless portable devices that hinder communication between devices. For users seeking to evade these attacks, such jammers are also the defense.

Keeping this dichotomy in mind, former Khoury doctoral student Hai Nguyen and his advisor Guevara Noubir, both members of Khoury College’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, have pioneered a novel approach that essentially cancels these high-powered jammers in situations where traditional techniques fail. This failure can happen because the traditional techniques are designed for nonmalicious interference, require mechanically moving parts that react slowly to jamming, or require additional bands of radio frequency to achieve resilience. The duo’s technique, which circumvents these scenarios, is called JaX.

“When you have wireless communication, you want to make it as robust and reliable as possible. As researchers, we like to tackle hard problems, and this problem has always been around,” Noubir said. “We wanted to solve it with a unique angle, and that angle was to develop safe communication techniques for GPS and Wi-Fi.”

READ: GPS is critical to modern life. It’s also vulnerable, and this researcher is out to fix that.

Nguyen and Noubir began working on this machine-learning-driven idea about a year ago, just as the Russia–Ukraine war — where signal jamming has played a massive role — was ramping up. As they built a large set of synthetic data and collected experimental material, their goal was to build a kind of black box which could be placed in front of a network and seamlessly protect users. The solution simplifies the cancelling of high-powered signal jammers by not requiring complex machinery.

“For data collection we built a test bed, for the transmitter we used software radio, and for the jammer and receiver we used other radios,” Noubir explained. “We sent legitimate signals and then we also sent the interference. We received them on two antennas which stored the data, so we knew what we were sending and what was interfering.

“One of the cool things about our results,” he added, “was that we could have an adversary jammer transmit signals more powerful than the legitimate ones, and we could remove the interference like it never existed!”

Noubir believes that the findings of the paper could prove useful for a wide range of individual and organizational users looking to avoid malicious attacks on their data.

“The fact that it is possible to achieve a really low bit error rate shows that we can overcome an adversary who is transmitting at one hundred times more than the legitimate signals,” he stated. “You can have something extremely noisy in the environment, but because we have JaX, we can estimate what the jammer is really transmitting, subtract it, and leave only the legitimate signals.”

While the process sounds promising, the benefits would only matter if the technology were logistically sound and affordable — two barriers that often prevent innovative technology from becoming ubiquitous. But Noubir believes he and Nguyen have cleared that hurdle too.

“Our machine learning models are compact, so if you are designing any new systems, you can easily incorporate this,” he said. “Similarly, if the Department of Defense wanted to integrate JaX, compared to other models, this price for this would be negligible and the model would be more efficient.”

Noubir and Nguyen — who recently defended his thesis and joined Meta as a research scientist — acknowledge that newer approaches to older problems would always require tweaks and fixes. Nonetheless, they’re hopeful that JaX might be the solution to a longstanding network issue, and they’re hoping to bring it to market.

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