Performance and Robustness LabAugusta University

Performance and Robustness Lab

Distributed Systems & Trustworthy AI

We study why large-scale cloud systems slow down, sometimes for just 50 milliseconds, and how to make machine learning models that hold up under adversarial attack.

School of Computer and Cyber Sciences Augusta University Georgia Cyber Center, Augusta, GA
Trustworthy AImodels we make robust Distributed systemsthe latency tail we shorten
Meet p99, our lab cat. Her body is a latency distribution, and her tail is the part we work to shorten.

News

    Research

    Systems

    Distributed systems and cloud computing

    We measure performance and scalability of large-scale web applications and IoT stream processing. Our central focus is transient bottlenecks: events lasting as little as 50 ms that propagate and amplify along dependency chains in modern distributed systems. Using fine-grained monitoring and timeline analysis, we find their root causes and remove them.

    • Tail latency in microservices and n-tier systems
    • Concurrency adaptation and autoscaling
    • LSM-tree based real-time stream processing
    AI

    Adversarial robustness and trustworthy AI

    We build defenses against adversarial attacks on neural networks, from image classifiers to vision-language and large language models, and study how to benchmark and verify their robustness, with applications in medical imaging and cybersecurity.

    • Adversarial robustness distillation
    • Robust zero-shot vision-language models
    • Neural network benchmarking and verification

    Team

    Portrait of Dr. Shungeng Zhang

    Shungeng Zhang, Ph.D.

    Principal Investigator · Assistant Professor of Computer Science

    Dr. Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University in 2021 and his B.E. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2014.

    Office
    Georgia Cyber Center, RV 2806, Augusta, Georgia 30901, USA
    Phone
    (706) 721-0506
    Email
    szhang2@augusta.edu
    Web
    sgzhang.top
    Experience
    • Sep 2021 – present: Assistant Professor, Augusta University
    • Aug 2015 – Aug 2021: Research Assistant, Louisiana State University (advisor: Prof. Qingyang Wang)
    • Jun 2019 – Aug 2019: Research Intern, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Japan (mentor: Dr. Yasuhiko Kanemasa)
    • Jun 2014 – Jan 2015: Research Assistant, HUST (Prof. Gang Shen)
    • Jun 2013 – Sep 2014: Research Assistant, HUST (Prof. Wenyu Liu)

    PhD students

    Publications

    Underlined names are lab students.

    Join the lab

    We are looking for students with a solid background in computer systems who share our research interests. Email Dr. Zhang with your CV and transcripts.

    Email Dr. Zhang